There are many similarities between the conflicts in “Lather and Nothing Else” by Hernando Téllez and “The Sniper” by Liam O’Flaherty. “Lather” is a short story about a barber in the South American revolution who is secretly working as an informer for the revolutionaries and is presented with the opportunity to kill one of his worst enemies, Captain Torres, a leader in the revolution. Although he is only an informer and a barber, he has Captain Torres’ life in his hands and ponders whether to kill or not kill him, but in the ends lets him go unharmed. In “The Sniper”, a Republican sniper is presented with the task to kill a Free Staters sniper in a civil war. When he gets shot, he has to escape by killing the enemy sniper and manages to do so, but notices that the Free Staters sniper that …show more content…
Captain Torres places himself in an immense danger of being killed by the barber’s razor while also making the barber angry. He does this by talking about how he would kill the rebels and making it more brutal and bloodier than the last time when he says, “it may be even better” (p. 15), when the barber asks if it would be as horrifying as last time and then telling the barber “They told me you would kill me…” (p.17) while the barber’s razor is right beside his neck, but when Captain Torres is about to exit the barber shop, he tells the barber that he knew that the barber a rebel all along when the barber had thought that none of the captains of the revolution knew that he was a rebel. In “The Sniper”, the Free Staters sniper stays very still, making other people in the area think that no one is where he is unlike the Republican sniper who risks taking a smoke and gets all the people in the area’s attention. Although this type of conflict is very important, this also leads to another one of the conflicts that are similar in the two stories, man versus