Liam O'Flaherty's Case

Symbolism Paper

Liam O'Flaherty's short story The Sniper, Nadine Gordimer's The Moment Before the Gun Went Off, and Elie Wiesel's The Watch are literary works made to describe; war, death, sorrow, partition and the human perseverance to survive and thrive. In a world where war diminishes human beings to ordinary objects, where war does not know any limits, age, sex, or family ties.

In The Sniper by Liam O'Flaherty an account of a moment in war is being told in a third-person narrative. O'Flaherty describes the thoughts of an Irish Republican Army sniper in a time where Ireland existed in an era of a great civil war.

Dusk in the capital city of Dublin, powerful weapons blast and bang occasionally adjacent to the River Liffey while the Free Staters and Republicans fight. Nearby O'Connell Bridge atop a desolate rooftop, an Irish Republican sniper with cold gleaming fervent eyes watches his perimeter while eating a measly meal and drinking some cheap alcohol out of a pocket flask. The climax of the story occurs when an armored vehicle next to the bridge proceeds with caution along the road, fifty yards ahead. The sniper on the rooftop does not shoot, realizing that his bullets would not penetrate the thick armor. At the same time an elderly woman began walking to the car to notify the man in the turret and directing her pointed finger to where the sniper was positioned atop the roof. It all happened in a blink of an eye, the shooter arose from his dome but the sniper was faster, killing the gunner and then the woman. The narrator presents, "Weakened by his wound and the long summer day of fasting and watching on the roof, he revolted from the sight of the shattered mass of his dead enemy. His teeth chattered, he began to gibber to himself, cursing the war, cursing himself, cursing everybody." (Gillespie , Pipolo, & Fonseca, 2008)

The Sniper concludes at the time the sniper understands that the opposing soldier he had gunned down was his own flesh and blood, his brother. The Sniper possesses many symbolic references, which expose the assumptions of war. In what can be described as the most obvious symbolic meaning, that no matter the circumstances we are all brothers and sisters.

In Nadine Gordimer's The Moment Before the Gun Went Off set in South Africa during the early 20th century. The era and setting of this short narrative story is very important as an entirety. Knowing the time period in which this story is established is crucial for the reason that it benefits the reader to comprehend the understandings of each character in the story, and the cultural customs, which the persons in the story have towards each other. With the understanding that this story was set in the early 20th century, the readers are capable of comprehending that back in that era it was normal for farmers to have black slaves tending to their farms. In this short narrative story a white famer by the name of Marias Van der Vyver unintentionally fires and kills one of his hunting companion, which also was one of his slaves. The aspect of the apartheid is a major key point to comprehend why this accident was a big deal.

What is more important in this short story by Gordimer is the attitude in which the narrator takes, the point of view in which the story is being explained. The narrator is a supporter for the apartheid law, in a matter in which he nonchalantly identifies the stereotype of the black people living in South Africa during that era. An illustration of his idea is that he presents topics like, how black people raise their offspring in a different matter than that of a white person. By narrating the story through this point of view, Gordimer is indicating the ingenuousness of the white people concerning the discrimination and segregation amongst whites and blacks during the apartheid.

The point of view of the narrator portrays a setting in which weaknesses of a segregated and persecuting apartheid is exposed. Perhaps the most revealing words of this story occur in the last paragraph when the pitch of the narrator alters and sounds like a completely different narrator. Those few words propose that the farmer murdered his slave who also happened to be his son. During the apartheid in South Africa, having a child with a person of the opposite race would be inconceivable and consequently kills his son to prevent the truth

...