The Sniper 'And The Man He Killed'

War is something that can change the very principles of a person, it can change a person and leave multiple effects that can last for their entire life. The sniper is fighting in a civil war where friends and family can turn into enemies at a moment's notice. The fight is between the Republicans and the Free Staters, the protagonist is a sniper for the Republicans. Throughout the story, we go into the state of mind of the main character and learn some ramifications that he gained in the war. The text, “The Sniper” by Liam O’Flaherty shows us the physical and psychological results of war, that happens to people.

Copious bullets, like that of torrential downpour, reign over the battlefield; a setting in which man created through dispute, engulfs each and every individual caught within it. Some are immediately spun into a downward spiral, while with others, it hits them in the midst -- even if they have built an immunity to war’s ways. Two fictional characters, both sharing a similar atmosphere, experience the true affects to war in their own ways. Although war never changes, the individuals do, no matter the situation. This is exemplified through the fictional tales, told by Liam O’Flaherty’s “The Sniper,” as well as Tim O’Brien’s “Where Have You Gone Charming Billy,” and as the main characters are to each their own story, they bear contradistinction to one another in the aspect of war, personality, and the emotional reactions to war.

These two stories are both eye opening about the evil in the civil war. This story has a few differences between these two stories that are about the civil war. In the story, there are plenty similarities of these two stories. These two men in this story have a good deal of similarities among themselves. Young men are very brave and fought in the war.

Wars often cause unforgettable losses and can lead to endless pain. The stories, The Sniper by Liam O'Flaherty and The Scarlet Ibis by James Hurst, both end with unbearable travesties. Both stories portray brotherhood and regret while the main characters fight very different battles.

Usually when someone is murdered, people expect the murderer to feel culpable. This though, is not the case in war. When in war, a soldier is taught that the enemy deserves to die, for no other reason than that they are the nation’s enemy. When Tim O’Brien kills a man during the Vietnam War, he is shocked that the man is not the buff, wicked, and terrifying enemy he was expecting. This realization overwhelms him in guilt. O’Brien’s guilt has him so fixated on the life of his victim that his own presence in the story—as protagonist and narrator—fades to the black. Since he doesn’t use the first person to explain his guilt and confusion, he negotiates his feelings by operating in fantasy—by imagining an entire life for his victim, from his

This realistic fiction short story “The Sniper” written by Liam O’Flaherty, features an Irish sniper in a war-torn Dublin. The narrator in this story takes part in an intensely violent sniper battle between him, another sniper, and even a machine gunner. In the passage he ends up doing something he will later on regret because of his own actions. O'Flaherty uses irony and word choice in the story to emphasize the theme that violence hurts everyone involved.

     The sniper develops insensitivity to death during the war. When he kills the old woman, she’s trying to run away and isn’t really a threat. He even “utters a cry of joy” when he finally shoots the enemy sniper. This shows how war can get people caught up in the cat-and-mouse “game” aspect of it and forget what they’re actually doing—killing people. People get so caught up in the “game” that they don’t think about the repercussions for their actions.

Overall both poems have similarities and differences in some ways. As both poems are against war and conflict in general. On the other hand the poem “war photographer” is about many different wars, rather than one specific war, and it’s mainly about how photographers share the truth to the world instead of what it was like to be there at the

"The Sniper" places a strong emphasis on the evils of war, and yet paints a vivid image of mankind's qualities and their society. Employing the technique of describing one particular sniper to symbolise a general subject, readers are able to gain a deep insight into the evils of war. In this story, the assembly of setting, contrasting characters and themes of fanaticism and division of loyalties are vital to conveying the horror of war. On the other hand, "The Sniper" also discusses the power of war, depicting it as the decider of life and death for men. Its force is further emphasised when neighbours are turned into enemies under war's influence.

Well I think that the theme of the story is that violence is not a way to resolve problems. Like for instances in the story when the sniper lost his brother and hear is an example, “Then the sniper turned over the dead body and looked into his brother's face” Violence is not necessary to solve your problems because if you use violence you would eventually hurt someone.

In the stories “Ambushed” by Tim O’ Brien, “The Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell and “The Sniper” by Liam O’Flaherty each story has similar and differences in the conflicts, characters and the setting. Every character has similar backgrounds leading to different conflicts. In each story they all use guns to kill their enemy but in each story their conflicts are completely different and cause them to have different prospective on what they do to survive.

In Liam O'Flaherty's suspense short story, The Sniper, A Republican sniper is in the midst of a battle in Dublin, Ireland. He gets injured and must kill his Free- Stater enemy. What he wasn’t aware of was the fact that the Free-Stater sniper was his brother. As aforementioned in the first sentence, the story is all about suspense, and there are three key ways The Sniper builds suspense. The Sniper draws out moments that wouldn’t ordinarily be drawn out, speeds up several events in rapid fire, and has all the events happening in swift succession.

“The Man He Killed” by Tom Hardy kicks off immediately talking about the man he once met in the war. An anonymous speaker starts off the poem talking about someone he met, and if they had met differently, they could’ve sat down and shared a drink together and had a good time. Hardy immediately has the reader wondering what extreme event took place in the current situation in which he met the man. This first stanza and the title both help foreshadow what the meeting between these two unknown men was. Hardy’s eloquent use of the setting in the opening stanza gives the reader a feasible idea that these two men could be or could’ve been great friends.

"The Man He Killed" by Thomas Hardy features an ex-soldier that is contemplating and thinking back upon a time when they took another soldier's life. In the poem, the narrator states that if the two had met in a bar they would have been good friends and shared a drink, but enlisting in war required them to meet in battle, leading to one of them being brutally killed. In the process of analyzing the situation, the narrator states, "I shot him dead because - / because he was my foe," (Hardy, 9-10). To put the poem in context, Thomas Hardy wrote his poem during the time of the Boer War, a horrendous battle fought between the British Empire and South Africa over South Africa no longer wanting to be unjustly controlled by the British (Shmoop Editorial

Through literature, Liam O’Flaherty, the author of the short story The Sniper, clearly illustrates how horrific and destructive war really is. He illustrates the appalling agony of the Irish civil war through a dramatic story of two brothers against each other in the war. Through the the author's writing, readers can conclude that the theme of The Sniper is that war destroys families. O’Flaherty sets emphasis on this theme by using many strong literary devices. The literary devices used that apply the most emphasis on the theme are situational irony, setting, and the author's use of direct characterization .