Liam O 'Flaherty's The Sniper'

“The Sniper” is a short story written by Liam O’Flaherty, a sniper who is Republican takes his rifle and stations himself on the roof without making any noise, waiting to take down his enemies. He sniper unintentionally gives up his secret location when he sparks a cigarette and reveals to the rival sniper on the other roof. Both snipers start a shoot off using both their shooting powers and sharpness. The Republican sniper think up a great idea and efficiently guns down the enemy sniper. The Republican sniper then goes to try and see who he had killed and comes to misfortune of it being his own brother. O’Flaherty utilizes “The Sniper” to display how war is a corruptive obsession that makes family turn against each other and this is made clear within this story through elements like the setting and theme. …show more content…
The author spends the beginning of the story to outline the setting and to picture the atmosphere of the story. “Dublin lay enveloped in darkness”; “darkness” immediately makes a feeling of anxiety and secret in the audience’s heads and also a nail-biting ambiance. The line “the dim light of the moon shine through fleecy clouds, casting a pale light” put across an emotion of isolation and sadness because the moon is usually looked at as lonely up in the sky. The author also sees Dublin as an unsafe and vulnerable town, filled with hostility with the associations of guns and other weapons. The Republican hits the ground after being hit, he leans back on a parapet, a defensive fence that the sniper utilizes to protect himself from from all the abuse and savage faces of war. These pictures exhibit loneliness, devastation and the harshness created by war and the pictures are created on purpose to display the audience the abusive contact that a war can