Name
Date
Hour
“The Sniper” Impromptu Checklist
I said the theme was:
In his short story “The Sniper”, Liam O’Flaherty uses irony
to show the brutality and uselessness of war.
My theme includes war: Yes
No
I used TAG in my lead:
No
Yes
I put quotation marks around the title of the short story: Yes
No
I stated the author used this to establish the theme: irony
My rewritten body paragraph: Through his characterization of the sniper, O’Flaherty
shows how war can take the innocence and compassion away from even a very young
man. The main character is a young man who ordinarily would not experience the
savagery and death of war. The sniper is described as having, “the face of a
student…but his eyes had the cold gleam of the fanatic”(6). Ordinarily, one wouldn’t
think of a student as a cold hearted killer, but this boy is. His job is to kill or be killed.
He is further described as having eyes “of a man used to looking at death” (6). Most
young people are not familiar with death, and they are not tainted and heartless,
however, the sniper is a killing machine who finds excitement in what he does. He
“had been too excited to eat”(6), showing the enjoyment he feels in carrying out his
barbaric job of killing other people. It is almost as though the sniper would rather carry
out his job than eat. Through the sniper’s passion for killing, the author illustrates
how even young people are subject to war’s devastation.