“War is like love, it always finds a way” (Bertolt Brecht). Although one is pure and the other evil, the forces of both love and war influence the best stories. A more interesting topic emerges when a character must choose between loyalty to a loved one and devotion to government. In “The Sniper” and “Cranes” the main character is involved in a civil war that calls for allegiance to the government despite his feelings for a loved one who fights for the opposite cause. “The Sniper” and “Cranes” are two similar pieces of literature, however both stories are different and unique from one another. Although these stories share similarities in the plot, the characters, and the theme they also show many differences.
“Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind.” President John Fitzgerald Kennedy said to the United Nations General Assembly, on September 25th, 1961. This quote is saying that the killing of soldiers in war will soon destroy all. This relates to both stories because both soldiers regretted killing someone. In O’Flaherty’s “The Sniper” and Hardy’s “The Man He Killed” both works use plot, irony, and theme to portray the idea that war causes you to kill those you care or may have cared about.
“Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.” John Fitzgerald Kennedy stated to the United Nation General Assembly on September 25, 1961. War causes people to turn on people so we need to stop it, before no one is left. There are many similarities yet differences between “The Sniper” by Liam O’Flaherty and “The Man He Killed” by Thomas Hardy by conveying them through three topics, plot, irony, and theme.
Imagine the life of a person who cannot eat or sleep when their body needs them to. Imagine him not having the small luxuries people take for granted every day. Instead, this person lives every waking moment on the famous quote “Kill, or be killed.” The identity of this person is a soldier. Liam O’Flaherty, a World War 1 veteran, takes his experiences of war and incorporates them into his short story “The Sniper.” This piece of literature discusses the topic of war and the internal and external conflicts of the people consumed by war.
Within Liam O’Flaherty’s short story, “The Sniper”, there are two literary devices that greatly impact the meaning of the story. These two literary devices are irony and mood, and together they show the reader how difficult war can be and how it can pull friends and families apart. While reading the text, the reader can feel how tired, lethargic, yet exciting war can be. On page 1, paragraph 3, the sniper was “eating a sandwich hungrily” because he “had eaten nothing since morning”. In this paragraph, readers can feel how the thrill of war can overcome a person, taking over their actions, emotions, and feelings.
These master works of war torn fiction, allow the reader to experience the impact war infuses on soldiers and citizens alike. Through powerful narration, these stories reveal how their characters are impacted physically, emotionally and psychologically by the war that surrounds
In Liam O’Flaherty’s The Sniper, the main character, a sniper, is in the middle of a civil war in Dublin, Ireland. It is his assigned duty to assassinate anyone on the the other side of the war, no matter who they are. This creates a huge conflict, considering that the sniper ends up killing his brother. This supports the central theme that war is cruel, and this can be supported by the craft elements of the dialogue used and the setting of the story.
In Tim O'Brien's “Enemies” and “Friends”, O'Brien shows the effect the nature of war has on individuals and how war destroys and creates friendships. These two stories describe the relationship between two soldiers, Lee Strunk and Dave Jensen. In “Enemies”, friendship is broken over a fist fight about a stolen jackknife, which leaves Strunk with a broken nose and Jensen paranoid of whether or not Strunk’s revenge is coming. While in “Friends”, you see how the nature of war creates a bond of trust, even between people who first saw each other as enemies.
Liam O’Flaherty’s realistic fiction story, “The Sniper” takes place in Dublin, Ireland. The main character is a sniper fighting a civil war. He is on the Republican side who is fighting against the Free Staters. He does not put a lot of thought into his actions and it ends up costing him something big in the end. By using irony and description O’Flaherty shows that action without thought can lead to serious repercussions.
No one returns from war the same person who went. War opens an unbridgeable gap between soldiers and civilians. There’s no truth in war—just each soldier’s experience. “You can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil” (from “How to Tell a True War Story,” in O’Brien’s story collection “The Things They Carried”). Irony in modern American war literature takes many forms, and all risk the overfamiliarity that transforms style into cliché.
The Civil War was a brutal time in American history, pinning neighbor against neighbor. Many families were broken up and soldiers often the went wandering into battle aimlessly. Frustrated by this war, an American author, Stephen Crane shows his distaste for this war by his ironic works: the poem “War is kind” and the short story “The Mystery of Heroism” by bringing the loss of family and pointless deaths to advocate against the war. Throughout “War is Kind” a mockery of how the barbarity of war affect spouses, children and parents of the soldiers lost. It specifically focuses on the families orientated around the soldiers in battle and how their deaths have came to be.
In the short story The Sniper, Liam O’Flaherty recounts a story of an Irish sniper fighting for the republican army during the Irish Civil War. He wrote this short story based on his experience with time at war. Liam o’flaherty illustrates how war can reduce the value of family and human lives, betrayal, and suspense. In this essay I will be discussing these major themes as well as comparing this story to books such as The Odyssey and others containing similar themes. This essay also will discuss how suspense is used in Liam O’Flaherty’s The Sniper.
Basically everything in a war could look beautiful in humans eyes, but every soldier hates war at the same time. The truth reached by the reader from this contrast is that why some might like going to war and what makes soldiers to keep going in
While both speak of the same topic, each author has varying reactions and testimonials to the conflict. Even though they each experienced the same war, each person
The books that are being compared and contrasted are both about The Civil War and what these soldiers went through. Each book has a few differences that separate them. The books are based on the same time period so they are going to have a lot in common. The books describe what both characters had to go through during the war. The differences in the book will show you how each soldier went through the war differently and the similarity’s will show you how it was for most of the soldiers in the Civil War.