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The Sniper Theme

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Essay "The Sniper" by O’Flaherty Imagine yourself in a war fighting for what you believed was best for your people and your country. Imagine going to war, knowing that you might die today. Imagine the fear and tension surrounding you while you're being shot at.

That’s what the story "The Sniper" by O’Flaherty is about. The story is about the individual’s personal cost in war. It tells about the way humans behave when they are surrounded by death on a regular basis, how they react to taking others’ lives and how they must suffer the consequences of their actions. The various themes in the story explore the questions of what war does to a person and their behavior. It also explores how much a certain cause is worth. This was evident when …show more content…

This just shows the dangerous side of the human being: of how a person is rather excited about the thought of getting into battle and things that he would normally have found repulsive and cruel to the point of being reckless about his own safety. When doing the same things over and over, it becomes routine, and you can trick yourself into feeling indifferent. “His face was the face of a student – thin and ascetic, but his eyes had the cold gleam of the fanatic. They were deep and thoughtful, the eyes of a man who is used to looking at death”. (Line 7-10, page 1)
He is just a normal young man although he is a fighter in the civil war. The young man killed a lot of people so he gets used to it and it doesn’t even affect him anymore.

In conclusion, it can be said that war is an evil obsession. War can affect the way we think and the way we act. “The Sniper” is just one example of how war affects people mentally. When you’re in the battleground, you don’t consider others. In fact the only thing on your mind is to kill the enemy. You continue fighting til the bitter end. You fight til the end, also when you tears families apart. And when you find out you’ve killed your own brother, it might just be too

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