Essay Questions

Who is the “informer” in “The Sniper” and what does it say about the fundamental conditions of civil war

The sniper watches from his position on the rooftop as an armored car prowls the streets slowly like a predatory cat. The narrator goes into the mind of the sniper to allow the reader to know that this is a car of the enemy. And, furthermore, that there is nothing in the sniper’s arsenal to allow him to damage it or the people inside. Tension is then raised as—like a camera panning sideways in a movie—the focus of the sniper is suddenly drawn to an old woman walking down the sidewalk. The narrator exits the mind of the sniper to become mere observer of events again and so the reader is left to briefly imagine whether the story is going take a horrific turn: the enemy attacking the old woman and the sniper unable to stop them.

As suddenly as that dramatic possibility might be raised in a reader, however, it is suddenly extinguished by something perhaps just as horrific: the old woman is seen speaking to those inside the armored car and her arm sudden stretchers out with a finger point directly to his location. She is an informant. The scene reveals the elevated dramatic element of a civil war where absolutely nobody can be trusted to actually be what they may seem and everyone is potentially on the other side.

There are no human characters or references to human beings in “The Wave.” How, then, can it be interpreted as an allegory of Irish history?

What many readers do not understand is that the simpler a story is—the more it is stripped down to the bare bones of descriptive storytelling—the greater the opportunity that is afforded for symbolic interpretation. One need not recreate the circumstances of reality in order to transform it into allegorical storytelling: setting the political and social issues at stake between the Irish and the British into a science fiction story set in distant galaxy, for instance.

“The Wave” is literally nothing but a sketch about the final moments in an eons-long battle against erosion between a rock and water. The story is like person a with a camera who just happened to be in the right place at the right time to snap a photo of the crumbling of the arch in a rock formation or mammoth sheet of ice breaking off glacier. Within that description of nothing but the natural course of geologic events, however, can be imprinted the history of British invasion, occupation, domination and decimation of the Irish language, its culture, and its political autonomy if one interprets the cliff as Ireland the sea as the British.

What key points in the narrative of “The Foolish Butterfly” support an interpretation of the story as warning about the imprudence of addiction?

This equally short story is also open to a number of valid interpretations. One that is not very likely easily attributed to authorial intention, but can be gleaned only from the text itself, is that it is a story which points out the dangers of addiction. Considering the subject matter with its references to nectar and drinking sap, it would also be easy to identify the specific addiction as being related to drug, but one need not be so precise. After all, it is the butterfly’s wings which are clearly identified as the source of its addictive behavior: the joy of flight. The identification of the wings a “godly thing” can too easily be applied to the natural point of origin of any number of addictions. The point at which the butterfly becomes addicted to flying for the joy itself rather than for pursuing flight for its instinctive purpose also intensifies this interpretation as being about addiction in the broader sense: many habits, compulsions and obsessions begin innocently in the company of others.

And then there is the description of the single moment that dooms the butterfly as he is overcome by the win that engines his joy of flying: “It excited the butterfly.” From that point forward the story becomes an account of a butterfly utterly lost in the grips of its addiction as he sails to his death high above the sea he never even saw. This interpretation even makes sense of the one word the author uses to identify his title creature in a way that other interpretations fail to do: addition is a foolish thing to fall into.