English Language and Literature Department

Spring 2021

Analysis

The Sniper
by Liam O'Flaherty (1923)

Plot Overview

Late at night, a lone Republican sniper waits atop a rooftop in Dublin, Ireland. It is June of 1922. Nearby
Republican and Free States forces battle over the Four Courts judicial building and throughout the city.

The sniper has been on the rooftop since the morning. Now he eats a sandwich and drinks some whiskey. He
risks lighting a cigarette for a quick puff. The light from his cigarette alerts an enemy soldier to his presence. A
bullet flies toward the sniper's rooftop. He puts out the cigarette and switches position.

However, the flash of the rifle tells the sniper his enemy's location. The sniper realizes that his enemy also has
taken cover—on the roof of the house across the street.

In the street below, an armored car moves. The sniper knows it is an enemy car but it would be useless to shoot
at it. As he watches, he sees an old woman approaching the car. She speaks to the soldier manning the turret,
pointing at the sniper's rooftop. As the turret opens and the soldier looks out, the sniper raises his rifle and
shoots him, killing him. Then the sniper shoots the old woman as she tries to run away.

From the roof opposite, the enemy sniper fires. His bullet hits the sniper in the arm, and he drops his rifle. The
sniper examines his wound. He realizes that the bullet is still lodged in his arm and that the arm is fractured. He
painfully applies a field dressing and then rests from his effort.

The sniper knows he must devise a plan. He cannot leave the roof because the enemy is blocking any exit from
the building, but if he is still on the roof in the morning, Free State soldiers will come for him and kill him. He
must kill his enemy before morning so he can escape.

The sniper places his cap on the muzzle of the rifle, which is now useless because he cannot operate it with only
one good arm. He pushes the rifle upward so the cap appears over the edge of the roof. In response, the enemy
sniper shoots, hitting the cap dead center. The sniper lets his rifle fall forward. He lets the hand holding the rifle
dangle over the side of the roof. Then the rifle clatters to the street. Finally, the sniper drags his hand back.

When the sniper peers over the roof, he sees that his plan has fooled the enemy into thinking he is dead. The
other sniper now stands uprights and looks across the street that separates the two houses. The sniper lifts his
revolver. Taking careful aim, the sniper fires and hits the enemy. The other sniper falls over the edge of the roof
down to the pavement below. On the street below, he lies still.

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Now that the battle is over, the sniper feels remorse. He curses the civil war and his own role in it. Then he hurls
the revolver to the ground. It goes off, sending a bullet past his head. The shock of the near miss returns him to
his senses.

The sniper takes a drink of whiskey and decides to descend from the roof and try to rejoin his company.
Retrieving his revolver, the sniper crawls down into the house. Once at the street level, the sniper has an urge to
see the man he killed. He might know the man from the army before the civil war began. The sniper runs into
the street, drawing a spate of machine gun fire from a distance. He throws himself on the ground besides the
corpse of the enemy sniper. He turns the body over. He looks into the face of his brother.

Characters:
1. The Sniper (protagonist)

The Sniper is the main character of the story. This young man is a member of the Republican army and his eyes
have "the cold gleam of the fanatic." A hardened fighter, the Sniper has become a man "used to looking at
death." In his role as a soldier, he functions efficiently and automatically. For instance, when he gets shot, he
applies his own field dressing despite the excruciating pain. Only occasionally does he allow himself to make
poor decisions, notably when he decides to risk lighting a cigarette, which alerts the enemy soldiers to his
location on the roof. He also runs into the street to find out the identity of the Enemy Sniper, drawing machine
gun fire upon himself.

The Sniper has been positioned atop a roof in Dublin. His role in the battle is not clear, but the streets of Dublin
are awash with fighting, and he likely has been assigned to shoot enemy targets in the streets below. Once the
Free State soldiers learn of his presence, the Sniper becomes involved in a standoff with the Enemy Sniper on a
rooftop across the street. The Sniper cannot leave his rooftop since the Enemy Sniper has him covered. Nor can
he risk staying on the roof until morning, which assuredly would lead to his death at the hands of Free State
soldiers. Injured by the Enemy Sniper, the Sniper devises a clever plan to draw fire and make the Enemy Sniper
think he is dead. Once his ruse succeeds, the Enemy Sniper lets down his guard and stops keeping his cover, so
the Sniper is able to fatally shoot him.

Once the Enemy Sniper is dead, the battle-hardened Sniper undergoes a transformation. The excitement of the
battle fades. Looking over the rooftop at the three people he has just killed—the Soldier in the Turret, the Old
Woman, and the Enemy Sniper—the Sniper feels remorse. His disgust for the civil war manifests itself
physically, as his teeth begin to chatter, and he starts cursing both himself and the war. When the Sniper
recovers his senses, his fear dissipates so much that he even risks being shot at to learn the identity of the Free
State soldier he has just shot. Only then does he realize that he has killed his own brother.

Throughout the story, the Sniper remains a somewhat mysterious, one-dimensional character. The narrative
reveals little of his feelings about what is happening around him, nor does it even share his reaction to the
knowledge that he has become his brother's murderer. Instead, the story directs the Sniper's actions and thoughts
to the battle. The Sniper's only identity is that of a solider.

The Story of an Hour: Study Guide | SparkNotes. (2005). Retrieved 10 March 2021, from https://www.sparknotes.com/short-stories/the-story-of-an-hour/
 2. The Enemy Sniper

The Enemy Sniper is the Sniper's main opponent in the story. A member of the Free State army, he still shares
similarities with the Sniper. The two men are engaged in the same role. The Enemy Sniper, too, is a good shot,
enough so that he wins the respect of the Sniper by the end of the story. His physical presence, on a rooftop
across the street, further reinforces the idea that he is a mirror image for the Sniper.

The Enemy Sniper wants to kill the Sniper. He appears to have the advantage after shooting and injuring the
Sniper. He makes a fatal error, however, when he falls for the Sniper's ruse. Once he thinks he has killed the
other man, the Enemy Sniper stands up on his rooftop, thus making himself a clear mark. The Sniper shoots
him, and he falls to the street below, dead. After that, the Sniper—along with the reader—discovers that the two
snipers are brothers.

3. The Old Woman

The Old Woman points out the Sniper's location on the rooftop to the Soldier in the Turret. The Sniper shoots and
kills her.

Themes:

Civil War

Though the story is quite brief, the reader can infer that the Irish civil war has brought great change to its
protagonist. The phrase that the sniper has "the face of a student, thin and ascetic" implies that the sniper may
have recently been a student but has taken up the arms of a soldier. Now warfare has transformed him. His
"deep and thoughtful" eyes are "used to looking at death," and they even hold "the cold gleam of the fanatic" in
his dedication to the Republican cause. The protagonist is only one of many young men who have joined either
one side or the other of this brutal civil war.

Warfare

A few key details in the story emphasize the bizarre landscape of warfare. The sniper undergoes a number of
emotional responses to the battle that non-soldiers or those who have not taken part in battle are likely to find
unusual. At the beginning of the story, during his stakeout, the sniper "had been too excited to eat." Right before
he shoots the enemy sniper, his "hand trembled with eagerness." When he sees that he has hit his enemy, he
"uttered a cry of joy." All the words O'Flaherty uses to describe the sniper's reaction to meeting and vanquishing
his enemy are positive, anticipatory words. In the world of warfare, killing a fellow human being is a victory;
for in war, soldiers, like the sniper, face a situation where they must kill or be killed.

Point of View

The narrative takes a limited, third-person point of view. The action is entirely funneled through the protagonist.
The reader sees only through his eyes, hears sounds through his ears, and processes events through his thoughts.
Despite this limited point of view, readers can clearly follow the action. The sniper observes the old woman on
the street below as she talks to the soldier in the turret of the armored car. "She was pointing to the roof where
the sniper lay," and the sniper—and the reader—knows that she is pointing at his location and that the soldiers
The Story of an Hour: Study Guide | SparkNotes. (2005). Retrieved 10 March 2021, from https://www.sparknotes.com/short-stories/the-story-of-an-hour/
may well come after him. When the sniper carries out his plan to trick the enemy sniper into thinking that he is
dead, he can tell that he has been successful. For the enemy "seeing the cap and rifle fall … was now standing
before a row of chimney pots, looking across, with his head clearly silhouetted against the western sky."
Though the story never gets deep in the mind of the enemy, the reader, like the sniper, knows that the Free
Stater "thought that he had killed his man."

This point of view works well with the emotional detachment of the narrative. Rarely does the protagonist show
his reaction to the events around him, other than the excitement of the battle and his momentary repulsion at
having killed another human being. Even when he learns that the man now lying in a "shattered mass" is his
brother, the sniper does not react. Instead, the story ends, leaving the reader to only speculate about his feelings.

Rhetorical Devices:
Simile e.g.
“Machine guns and rifles broke the silence of the night, spasmodically, like dogs barking on lone farms.”
Metaphor e.g.
Around the beleaguered Four Courts the heavy guns roared.”
“The sniper could hear the dull panting of the motor . . . His bullets would never pierce the steel that covered
the gray monster.”

Irony
The irony of “The Sniper” is situational.
Situational irony: an event occurs that contradicts the expectations of the reader.
Neither the reader nor the Republican sniper expects the two snipers to be brothers fighting against each other.

The Story of an Hour: Study Guide | SparkNotes. (2005). Retrieved 10 March 2021, from https://www.sparknotes.com/short-stories/the-story-of-an-hour/