Narrator and point of view

The short story “The Sniper” by Liam O’Flaherty is told from the point of view of a third-person narrator. The story is told entirely from the sniper’s perspective, so the narrator is limited. We only gain information about the other characters in the story from the sniper’s point of view, and only once he becomes aware of it himself. For instance, he realizes the old woman is an informer from her gesture of “pointing to the roof where the sniper lay” while talking to the man in the armored car. More importantly, he only learns the enemy sniper is his brother at the very end, when the sniper looks at his face. 

The narrator gives us access to the sniper’s thoughts and feelings about the events. For instance, we can follow his thought process wh...