The Sniper Themes

“The Sniper” abounds with all sorts of divisions, both figurative and literal. The story takes place just before dawn, the moment of division between night and day. Up until the end, all the action takes place on the rooftops of Dublin, where a Republican sniper and an enemy sniper face each other on roofs across the street from one another, another literal division. The story takes place during the early weeks of the Irish Civil…

“The Sniper" is a war story, and it explores questions of violence and enmity and how they affect the people who participate in and are caught up in the war. The Republican sniper kills three people over the course of the story: the man in the armored car, the old woman, and the enemy sniper. The Republican sniper does not have much of a choice: for him it is either kill or…

The sniper goes through a lot of physical pain in “The Sniper”—he gets shot in the arm, he uses a painful antiseptic to protect the wound from infection, he drags himself from the roof of a building and manages even to run across the street—but by the end of the story the reader understands that the greatest pain that he will experience will be the emotional pain of having killed his brother, the…

Despite the enmity between combatants, the story also shows that a strand of human curiosity, of desire to understand and connect with the enemy, is present still. The Republican sniper proves himself to be not totally bloodthirsty, despite the surge of joy he feels upon killing his rival. Rather, after the adrenaline and drama of battle, the Republican sniper immediately understands that his rival was a person, and that the killing of a person is…