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Liam O 'Flaherty's Short Story The Sniper'

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Recommended: Essay for the sniper

Zak Klug
Mrs. Hepworth
English 9
18 November 2015 In the short story “The Sniper” by Liam O’Flaherty, the author’s message about strategy is that if you have a better strategy than your opponent, you are more likely to be more successful than your opponent. In the story, the main character is a sniper that has to kill people from the opposing side. He gets into a showdown with an opposing sniper and ends up getting shot in the arm. Due to this he cannot use his rifle, he must now be very strategic in order to kill the other sniper and survive. The main character would not have survived if he did not have better strategy than his opponents because, “She was pointing to the roof where the sniper lay (2).” The women made it very clear and obvious …show more content…

Then he sank to the roof, dragging his hand with him (3).” The main character took a much better approach than his opponents. Although it made it so the opposing sniper could see him, he made himself appear to be dead. By doing so, the opposing sniper thought he had killed the main character so he came out of hiding. Due to him coming out of hiding, he allowed the main character who was pretending to be dead to have a clear and easy shot on him. This was a very good strategy to lure the other sniper out of hiding, allowing him to kill the opposing sniper. This is similar to what happened in the movie Batman Begins, when the joker pretends to be dead when he is brought into the room so the man that wants him dead lowers his guard. He was not expecting anything bad to happen at that moment allowing the joker to kill him. If he would have taken a better approach and used a better strategy he would likely have been more precocious which would have allowed him to live. Similar to how the opposing sniper did not expect anything bad to happen to him because he thought he killed the main character, which ended up leading to his death. Both of these scenarios show that in life, you cannot let your guard down, and you must use good strategy,

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