O’Flaherty as well as using character development to bring about his theme, uses description heavily. He describes the republican sniper in a way to make sure that the reader can clearly understand his theme. Because his theme is that war can drive some men to madness, O’Flaherty makes the character out to be somewhat crazy. The story shows this in paragraph 20 when O’Flaherty writes, “The Republican sniper smiled and lifted his revolver above the edge of the parapet”(3). The description in this quote, perfectly arranged to hint at O’Flaherty’s theme. The key detail in this quote is “smiled”. This single detail adds the them into the sentence. This showed that to some extent, the sniper was enjoying what he was doing, that he didn’t have any
