Thematic Comparison: The Sniper vs. Full Metal Jacket

War shows no boundaries in both the short story The Sniper by Liam O’Flaherty  and the film Full

Metal Jacket directed by Stanley Kubrick.

Both demonstrate war reduces the value of  human beings to mere targets. This is evident in The Sniper when the main character is positioned in his hiding place. A woman informs an enemy solider where he is and “the sniper raised his rifle and fired...” and as the women flees to escape, the sniper fires at her and “the woman whirled around and fell with a shriek to the gutter”. The sniper fired his rifle with intent to kill without any hesitation. Even though the woman was defenceless and not armed, he chose to kill her. Her gender, appearance and reaction of desperation did not affect his decision at any point. This event in the story shows that the sniper saw her as a target to shoot and not as human being.  Another example of how the value of human beings is reduced to targets is shown in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. When Joker and Rafterman are on their way in the helicopter, they ride along side another soldier. The soldier appears to be amusing himself greatly as he uses his machine gun to shoot at people collecting rice. He laughs and turns to Rafterman and Joker and exclaims “Ain’t war hell?” and continues to shoot. This is a very clear example as to how war reduces the value of human beings because this man saw these people collecting rice like characters in a video game. He was shooting at them to entertain himself. In both the movie and the story, the soldiers saw human beings as targets and nothing more.

Both the movie and the story depict that what the protagonist(s) envisioned the enemy to be did not match with who they encounter in the end. The sniper feels a sense of accomplishment when he hits the enemy sniper who was shooting at him. He was curious to discover the identity of the sniper he had just killed so he “turned over the dead body and looked into the face of his brother”. The ending of this story leaves the reader to speculate if this was his related brother or figurative brother; however in both contexts it clearly shows that the sniper did not expect the enemy he killed to be his brother. This moment shows that individual soldiers are not the enemy and that the only thing that makes them the enemy is the side they are fighting for. In the film, a hidden sniper taunts two soldiers slowly with painful hits they die. The rest of the group make their way into the building the sniper is shooting from. In a dramatic sequence of events, it is discovered that the skillful sniper is a young teenage girl. The look of shock and disbelief is obvious on every soldier as they look into the vulnerable young face of the girl who is fatally wounded on the floor begging them to shoot her.  The enemy was unexpected for these soldiers because perhaps they expected that kind of accurate precision and merciless behaviour from a cruel faced and intimidating soldier. Instead the feared and cruel enemy was a young civilian girl. In both examples, it leads to the question of who the enemy is during war and what makes them the enemy. 

By: Andrea