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The setting of “The Sniper” not only captures the location of historical events dramatized in the story but also emphasizes the collapse of normal life into the chaos of war. Horrific in any setting, the conflict described in the story is especially so because it occurs not in an abandoned or bombed-out city, but in Dublin, a city where, just a few days earlier, residents went about daily life. Now it is the site of a battle. Military personnel and vehicles are seen in action, yet nothing in the setting itself suggests any reason for conflict. That the protagonist is perched on a rooftop in a neighborhood near a pretty river on a warm June night reinforces the unsettling nature of a once-safe city at war. Residences, businesses, and government buildings have been repurposed to serve as a battlefield in which an everyday street serves as a no-man’s land between enemy territories.
The neighborhood-as-battleground setting is especially apparent in the rooftops where the two snipers wait. In the same way that soldiers erect parapets—protective embankments of earth and stone—the snipers hide behind their own parapets, low walls that enclose rooftops. Chimney stacks provide cover the same way trees on a battlefield would, and the skylights offer access to safer rooms below, similar to trenches that provide shelter to soldiers. In essence, the snipers convert residential buildings into a battlefield, so that no place is safe from war. Innocuous city features such as a bridge over a river, a gutter by a street, or a laneway linking buildings should be neutral and harmless, yet because of the civil strife, they have become avenues of attack and ambush.
