“The Sniper”
The sniper patiently lies in wait for his prey which turns into a battle for survival. The standoff reaches a point where it is literally kill or be killed; the outcome can only be one of those two things. The tension builds to a point where the release is almost orgasmic. And then the metaphor continues along those lines even climaxing:
“The lust of battle died in him.”
“The Waves”
This story is swept along by a current of metaphor and a rising tide of similes. Every paragraph provides at least one example and nearly every sentence in those paragraphs, for that matter:
“It was nearly high tide. But the sea moved so violently that the two reefs bared with each receding wave until they seemed to be long shafts of black steel sunk into the bowels of the ocean.”
“Spring Sowing”
O’Flaherty is an author whose reputation is constructed upon a foundation of writing about the natural world. As a result, one can expect to come across nature metaphors in those things not about the natural world and similes used to enhance the description of nature in those stories which are:
“The sky had a big grey crack in in it in the east, as if it were going to burst in order to give birth to the sun.”
Nature as God’s Handiwork
Very often the metaphorical imagery in the descriptions of nature introduces the element of God’s hand in its design. This used to be very common in fiction, but as society becomes secular not so much anymore:
“The shining star was pouring down upon the dewy earth myriads of beams that rippled like the laughter of a happy God.”
A Private’s Life
“The Alien Skull” is a war story, but not just another anti-war tale informed by the horrors of World War I. It is one of the most intense and complex stories about that war ever written. In fact, it is almost certain that “The Alien Skull” is the most ferociously extreme displays of dramatic and psychological intensity produced by the writer, making “The Sniper” almost seem like a comedy in comparison. And even before Private Mulhall makes it into the midst of battlefield hell, the metaphors are tempestuous:
“An enormous, invisible, inhuman machine, made of terrible words, constituted in his mind the terror that gave power to his superiors over him.”
