Dragons, witches, princesses and knights. These are the imaginary friends in so many children’s lives. For young adults, those fairy tale characters give way to darker characters and more realistic situations. However, what do they all have in common? They live in short stories Two stories that are interesting are “The Sniper” by Liam O’Flaherty and ” A Sound of Thunder” Ray Bradbury. Both center around grow men have guns to kill something. The Sniper in “The Sniper” has part of the army trying to take out enemies. Eckels is trying to hunt a T. rex back in the past to win $10,000.
While there are some obvious similarities, both authors approach these stories, specifically the characters, tone and point of view, in different ways. The main characters of both stories are similar because they both had guns in the story. The author does not describe the type of gun it was so we have to infer that the gun is a sniper. For example in the beginning of the story after the first paragraph on a roof-top a Republican sniper lay watching “Besides him lay his rifle”(O’Flaherty). He has the gun to his job which might be use to kill somebody or something. Similarly Eckels was talking to another couple of people about killing things.
For example “his hands tight on a new rifle”(Bradbury). He has that new rifle because he’s going to go hunt animals in the wild or something close to that However, the two men are different form each other too in how they didn’t kill the same thing. The Sniper killed people a couple of yards away from him. “The sniper raised his sniper and fired.. the sniper fired again the women whirled and fell with a sudden shriek”(O’Flaherty). The sniper shoot them because they were going to shoot before him and try to kill him. Eckels on the on the other hand was to scared to kill anything. “It can’t be killed”(Bradbury).
Eckels stated that because the dinosaur was to living a normal life didn’t to get killed because it didn’t do anything to the people. Both stories have similarities in their tone that the narrator uses, which is terror for example, in the story “The Sniper”, the sniper “took a deep breath… and fired… Then the sniper turned over the dead body and looked at his dead brother face”(Flaherty). This sent a bad thought to the readers knowing that he killed his own brother and this probably made the sniper feel horribel because he killed his own family.
In “A sound of thunder” Eckels was ready to kill a T. Rex “I’ve hunted tiger, wild bear, buffalo, elephant, but now this is it” Eckels must be a good hunter and must enjoy it a lot since he’s killed a lot of them before. That must mean they are good with guns and they take their time. They have a lot of similarities but the differences are that “The Sniper” didn’t know it didn’t it was his brother. “Then the sniper turned over the dead body and looked into his brother’s face”. He must have been super sad to see his dead brother on the floor with blood all around him.
In “A Sound of Thunder” Eckels didn’t want to kill the dinosaur because it was to beautiful to get killed. it can’t be killed”. Eckels stated that because the dinosaur was going to die by itself because the tree was going to fall on him. The point of view that these two stories take are first person and third person omniscient “The Sniper” is first person because the author only talks about the sniper only no matter what happens it’s only says what the sniper does. “The sound of thunder” is third person omniscient because the author tells what other people are saying and thinking. It is clear that there are several similarities between “The Sniper” and “A Sound of Thunder” as well as differences.
Both stories show the heartache of men who had gun with an occasional of killing something different and are written in the third person limited point of view. While the similarities are strong, they are different in the characters actions to the situations and in how they act and how they feel. There are both great storied by great authors, which touched the hearts of people who read them because of the great personnel struggles that go n in everybody. Perhaps they will all make us look deeper into ourselves and then take a look at the bidder pictures of things.
