The Sniper by Liam O'Flaherty
Quick answer: The Sniper by Liam O'Flaherty: complete summary with the famous ending, characters, themes of civil war and dehumanisation, and the story's ruthless craft.
A June night in Dublin, 1922. On a rooftop near O'Connell Bridge a young Republican sniper eats a sandwich, risks the match-flare of a cigarette, and draws a bullet from the darkness across the street. Somewhere on the opposite roof is an enemy who shoots as well as he does, and before dawn one of them will be lying in the road below.
Liam O'Flaherty published the story in 1923, while the Irish Civil War it describes was barely cold, and it remains one of the most anthologised war stories in English. It is very short, stripped almost to stage directions, and it ends with a single sentence that has shocked generations of school readers. The whole design of the story exists to earn that sentence.
The story in brief
The Republican sniper, young, with the face of a student and the eyes of a fanatic, is posted on a rooftop during the fighting between Republicans and Free Staters. His cigarette gives away his position and a bullet strikes the parapet. An enemy armoured car crosses the bridge and stops below; an old woman, an informer, points up at his roof. When the car's turret opens, the sniper shoots the soldier inside, then shoots the fleeing woman, who falls in the gutter. The enemy sniper opposite fires again and shatters his right forearm. In pain, unable to use his rifle, the sniper dresses the wound and thinks his way out of a death sentence, because to stay until morning is to be caught, and the enemy is watching.
So he stages his own death. He raises his cap on the rifle muzzle above the parapet; the enemy shoots through it; the sniper lets the rifle clatter to the street and drops his hand limply over the roof edge. Deceived, the enemy sniper stands upright against the sky. The Republican takes his revolver and, with a difficult shot across the street, hits him. The enemy reels and falls off the roof, his body striking the pavement below. Then comes the countercurrent: revulsion floods the sniper, he curses the war and himself, and hurls the revolver down, where it goes off and nearly kills him with the ricochet. Steadied by whiskey, he feels an itch of curiosity about the marksman he has beaten, wondering if he knew him from before the army split. He risks machine-gun fire to cross the street, drops flat beside the corpse, and turns it over. The story ends as he looks into his brother's face.
The characters
Nobody in the story has a name, and the anonymity is the point.
Themes and meaning
The examiner's list writes itself: civil war divides families, literally here; war dehumanises, turning a student into a machine that fires at whatever moves; violence has no glory, only adrenaline followed by nausea. The story also studies the gap between skill and understanding: the sniper is brilliant at his job and blind to its meaning until the final line forces the meaning on him. The old woman's death matters to the theme; O'Flaherty gives the protagonist a kill that no reader can call clean, so we are never allowed to root for him innocently.
The sharper reading: the brother reveal is not really a twist about family. Because neither sniper has a name, either man could be either brother, and any enemy in a civil war could be the man across the table from you last Christmas. The final line does not change the story's facts; it changes their address, moving the death from the enemy column to the family column. That is why the story ends there, with no reaction shot: any grief O'Flaherty described would shrink the horror to one man's bad night.
The craft: an ending built like an ambush
The story is told in a flat, camera-like third person, almost without interiority: actions, distances, light. That reportorial coolness is a trap for the reader, who settles into watching a duel of professionals, and it makes the two eruptions of feeling, the remorse after the kill and the last line, hit with full force. The ruse sequence is a miniature lesson in procedural writing: each step, cap, muzzle, dropped rifle, dangling hand, is concrete and causally linked, so the enemy's fatal mistake feels reasoned, not convenient.
The last line works because it was loaded early. The enemy is established as an excellent shot, the sniper wonders whether he knew him from before the split, and the whole city is presented as one family at war with itself. When the reveal comes, it confirms what the story has been whispering rather than contradicting it, which is the difference between a twist and a gimmick. A last sentence that reframes everything before it, honestly seeded, is exactly the discipline the Storytelling and Structure marks in Writory's Short Story Contest are built to reward.
The line that carries it
One sentence does the work of a chapter: "Then the sniper turned over the dead body and looked into his brother's face." Notice the construction. The sentence is pure action until its final two words, and it ends the story instantly, with no reaction, no dialogue, no mourning. O'Flaherty trusts the white space after the full stop to hold everything the sniper feels, and the restraint is why readers remember the line for decades. If you quote only one thing in an exam, quote this, and say what the missing reaction shot achieves.
What poets can take from this
- For exams, name the themes as the dehumanising force of war and the way civil war turns brother against brother, citing the anonymity of the characters as evidence.
- Use the old woman's death to argue that O'Flaherty refuses to make his protagonist heroic.
- Explain the ruse step by step; examiners reward candidates who can show how the plot's logic works, not just what happens.
- Writers, study how a cold narration style makes rare moments of emotion detonate.
- Seed your twist the way O'Flaherty does: the enemy's skill and the sniper's curiosity make the brother reveal inevitable in hindsight.
- End at the moment of impact; resist the epilogue that tells readers how to feel.
Try it yourself
Write a story about two rivals in the same contest of skill, chess players, debaters, drone pilots, who never see each other's faces until the final page. The reveal of identity must reframe every earlier scene, and you must end within one sentence of the reveal.
Questions
What happens at the end of The Sniper?
After killing the enemy sniper with a revolver shot and watching the body fall to the street, the Republican sniper is overcome by curiosity about who he was. He crosses the street under machine-gun fire, turns the corpse over, and finds he has killed his own brother. The story ends on that discovery.
What is the main theme of The Sniper?
The story shows how war, especially civil war, strips people of humanity. The sniper kills three people with professional calm, including an old woman, before remorse breaks through, and the final reveal that his enemy was his brother makes the self-destruction of a divided nation brutally literal.
Why does the sniper shoot the old woman?
She is an informer: he sees her point out his position to the soldier in the armoured car. By the logic of his war she is an enemy combatant, so he fires as she runs. O'Flaherty includes the killing to show how completely the conflict has erased moral boundaries.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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