The Sniper

“The Sniper” can be considered wartime literature. Both the story’s dark setting and thinly developed characters are characteristic of this genre. The city of Dublin is a character unto itself, described by specific place names (Four Courts and the River Liffey), and besieged by warfare. O’Flaherty describes Dublin as a victim of the street fighting that ravaged the city during June 1922, the opening month of the Irish Civil War. The city is “enveloped in darkness” (Paragraph 1). The only light is a “dim light,” provided by the moon. The motif of darkness contributes to the theme of anonymity. No one is recognizable to the sniper nor to the reader, who is at the mercy of the sniper’s limited third-person narration. Neither the sniper nor other characters are named. Even stereotypical identities are blurred; for example, the old woman would have represented an unthreatening persona during peacetime, but in this context she’s a would-be informant for the enemy. This motif of identity ambiguity climaxes at the end of the story, when the sniper does not know the identity of his brother and shoots him.