In the short story The Sniper and the poem The Man He Killed, authors Liam O’Flaherty and Thomas Hardy send the message that war influences people to perform actions that they would never repeat in other circumstances, ripping families apart and destroying lives. Both authors use the literary device of irony to convey their points. In The Sniper, a sniper shoots and kills an enemy before he “[turns] over the dead body and looked into his brother’s face”. O’Flaherty expresses the sentiment that war caused the sniper to kill his own brother, an irreversible action that he would never have repeated had the situation been different. O’Flaherty multiplies the impact of the sniper’s realization through irony, hiding the information from both the
