Monday, May 19, 2014

How does the short story, "The Sniper," relate to other texts?

Liam O'Flaherty's short story "The Sniper" is essentially anti-war. It portrays a sniper alone on a rooftop during the Irish Civil War. Although he is successful in killing his enemies, the horrors of war eventually get to him as demonstrated in this paragraph:


The sniper looked at his enemy falling and he shuddered. The lust of battle died in him. He became bitten by remorse. The sweat stood out in beads on his forehead. Weakened by his wound and the long summer day of fasting and watching on the roof, he revolted from the sight of the shattered mass of his dead enemy. His teeth chattered, he began to gibber to himself, cursing the war, cursing himself, cursing everybody.



Ever since there have been wars writers have condemned them. In ancient Greece the playwright Aristophanes wrote Lysistrata, a comedy about women who try to end war. Modern warfare has had no shortage of critical writers. Some of Ernest Hemingway's greatest works deal with war and the toll it takes on soldiers. As in "The Sniper," Hemingway describes the grim elements of war in his short sketches between short stories in his book In Our Time. In chapter six he paints a picture of a wounded man:



Nick sat against the wall of the church where they had dragged him to be clear of machine-gun fire in the street. Both legs stuck out awkwardly. He had been hit in the spine. His fact was sweaty and dirty.



Like O'Flaherty, Hemingway uses an objective, newspaper account style when he writes about war. He uses short, direct sentences and intense realism. His best accounts of war are probably in his novels A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls.


Another anti-war book written around the same time is Erich Maria Remarque's masterpiece All Quiet on the Western Front. The book goes into great detail to portray the mental and physical toll a war can take on men. It is about German soldiers in World War I and the harsh conditions they endured during the interminable war in the European trenches. 

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