The Sniper: Summary & Analysis

Beginning

Dublin, June, the Irish Civil War. A Republican sniper takes position on a rooftop near O'Connell Bridge as night falls. He eats a sandwich, drinks from a flask, lights a cigarette — the cigarette is a mistake that gives away his position. He kills a Free State soldier who emerges from an armoured car, then an old woman who pointed out his position to the soldier. He is shot through the forearm by an enemy sniper on the opposite rooftop.

Rising action

The sniper treats his wound with iodine and a field bandage and plans how to escape his position. He cannot use his rifle with the damaged arm. He props the rifle on the parapet with his cap on the muzzle — the enemy sniper shoots the cap; the sniper lets the rifle fall as if he has been hit and drops out of sight. The enemy sniper rises to look, thinking him dead. The sniper shoots him with his revolver. The enemy sniper falls.

Ending

Curious, the sniper crosses the street and turns the body over. The story ends in a single sentence: he finds himself looking into the face of his brother.

The Republican sniper

The sniper is young — his face has 'the cold gleam of the fanatic' — and competent: he kills efficiently and under pressure, improvises when wounded, and displays no hesitation. O'Flaherty gives him a moment of revulsion after his first kill ('the lust of battle died in him') — but this passes quickly and he continues. His curiosity about his enemy at the end is the one human impulse that drives him across the street and into the story's revelation.

Dublin in civil war

O'Flaherty sets the story with precise local detail — O'Connell Bridge, the Four Courts burning in the distance, armoured cars on the streets — that grounds the civil war as a specific historical event. The city at night is silent and then violently loud: the familiar sounds of peacetime punctuated by gunfire. The setting makes visible what a civil war actually means: people who know each other, who share streets and families, killing each other.

Civil war and fratricide

The story's central irony is structural: the Irish Civil War divided families and communities who had fought together in the War of Independence. O'Flaherty makes the political literal — the two snipers are literally brothers on opposite sides. The word 'civil' in civil war means both 'of the city' and 'of citizens': people of the same polity killing each other. O'Flaherty's final sentence is his definition of what civil war means.

Economy and the withheld interior

O'Flaherty gives the reader almost nothing of the sniper's psychology: there are no thoughts, no ideology, no back story. The story is entirely action and sensation. This restraint means the ending has nowhere to hide — there is no psychological frame that softens it. The discovery of the brother's face is experienced by the reader as directly as by the sniper, with no interpretive cushion.

The cigarette and human error

The story opens with the sniper making a tactical mistake — lighting a cigarette that gives away his position. This small human moment of carelessness (hunger for nicotine, momentary inattention) initiates the chain of events that leads to the shoot-out. O'Flaherty uses it to establish that the sniper is not a machine; his humanity — his desire for a cigarette — is what puts him in danger. The story begins with a human weakness and ends with the exposure of a human truth.