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Examples Of Figurative Language In The Sniper

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compound-complex sentence. Highlight them in the appropriate colors.

*Text-Dependent Analysis/Discussion Questions are included in the PDFs of the articles to guide you. You DO NOT need to answer the questions.

Maxim Houde
Ms. Sobczak
English CP 9
14 January 2023
Midterm Literary Device Essay
The short story, "The Sniper," written by Liam O'Flaherty, was published in 1923. The story places the reader to watch the Irish Civil War take place and follow a sniper who is positioned on a rooftop in Dublin Ireland. The sniper is a Republican, fighting against the Free State forces. The story devolves slowly into the theme of the brutal and senseless nature of war and the dehumanization of soldiers when forced to fight against both their loved …show more content…

"Here and there through the city, machine guns and rifles broke the silence of the night, spasmodically, like dogs barking on lone farms." This quote, being a simile, is able to instill danger and fear into the reader as the primary feeling throughout the story. This statement also gives a vivid description of the setting of war and the constant life-threatening situations the protagonist, the sniper, goes through. Furthermore, O’Flaherty portrays that feeling further by using irony. In this short story it presents an example of situational irony when the Republican Sniper finds out that the man he killed was his brother. This is situational irony, because while he was fighting to kill the enemy sniper, it instead wasn't his enemy, and was actually one of the closest people in the Republican Snipers' life, and this is shown due to the author describing the remorse the Sniper felt. This irony is not just to catch the reader off guard but shows how in the heat and stress of battle, as mentioned later, causes impulsive decisions that in this case killed the relationship between men, friends, and in this case, brothers. Not only that but it causes the man to lose his motivation to continue fighting in the war, and to him, he likely lost

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