Chance and Ingenuity Theme Analysis

“The Sniper” demonstrates how both chance and ingenuity are essential components to war—how sometimes they go hand in hand, and sometimes they do not. The eponymous sniper is both lucky and clever in his survival and his defeat of the enemy sniper. From the start, the sniper understands that chance plays a large part in the ultimate survival of any soldier. He decides to take the risk of lighting the cigarette, despite the fact that his enemy might see the flash—as the enemy actually does. When he does get shot shortly afterwards, it is due only to chance that he is not hit in a more vital part of his body than his arm, just as it is chance that the old woman sees him just as the man in the armored car rolls down the street. Still, the soldier in war does not exist entirely at the whims of chance without control of any sort, and it is ingenuity that allows the sniper to trick the enemy soldier into thinking that he has been killed. However, in going to investigate the enemy sniper, the sniper gives himself to chance once more. It is chance that allows him to survive the gunfire that follows him down the street, and finally also chance that the man that he has killed is his brother—an irrevocably cruel act of chance, but one perhaps no more unlikely than any of the others. O’Flaherty, consequently, demonstrates how war often happens as a series of chance results that one after the other lead either to continued life or to death. That two specific people end up facing each other in war is also a matter of chance, for the enemy sniper could have been nearly any young man from Ireland. Though ingenuity clearly plays a part in the sniper’s survival, it is mostly chance—and a chance decision—that leads him to survival even as he happens to kill, in his lucky fight against his enemy, his very own brother.