Irish writer Liam O’Flaherty is almost certainly more well-known as a novelist than as a short story writer. And it is likely that he is most famous for his novel which was adapted into classic film by legendary director John Ford, The Informer. Over the course of a century, the sweeping tide of critical assessment has reached a nearly unanimous appraisal that O’Flaherty’s true gift for crafting fiction is to be found on display in his short stories rather than in longer works. In fact, as his legacy as a major author of short fiction has grown, the reputations of his novels—even The Informer—have steadily declined.
Many of O’Flaherty’s stories—both long and short form—deal with the particular and peculiarities of battle for Irish independence. His very first published story is one of those exercises in irony that too often occur during civil war. “The Sniper” shares much of the basic plot with Ambrose Bierce’s masterwork, “Horseman in the Sky.” Both are about snipers training their sights on a target that turns out in the end to be a close family member. With Bierce, it is son killing father while O’Flaherty’s sniper shoots his brother. The difference between the two stories is not that it becomes a surprise who each sniper winds up killing, but something more significant and suggestive of the difference between these two writers.
Bierce’s sniper knows from the beginning who lies in his target while shock of recognition is equal for both sniper and reader in O’Flaherty’s much short tale. This divergence in the fundamental tone of these stories is one that highlights the basic approach of each writer and, in turn, illuminates the strengths of O’Flaherty’s body of work as a whole. Bierce embraced irony about a century before it was cool. The revelation that his Union sniper has purposely killed a Confederate soldier that he knows is his father is not intended to produce a shock of pure emotional devastation, but an intellectual response directed toward the absurdity of the entire war. O’Flaherty’s story ends with a sentence is intended for almost nothing but emotional devastation at the irony:
“Then the sniper turned over the dead body and looked into his brother’s face.”
O’Flaherty’s short fiction consistently moves toward the emotional punch. Although he shouldn’t really be categorized as a “war writer” it is worth pointing out another story stimulated by the wartime reality of the Irish fight for independence. “The Mountain Tavern” is more expansive than “The Sniper” and allows for multiple perspectives of the narrator rather than being constrained literally to just one singular overriding purpose. It is a story about Republican soldiers desperately searching for sanctuary as the carry a wounded comrade who happen upon a smoldering tavern. The tavern owner helps tend to the fallen soldier, but her perspective by this point in the battle between Republicans and Free-Staters is that there is no difference between them. The constant waging of war has left her life in shambles and her tavern destroyed and nothing about the situation they are fighting over has shifted so much as a single degree. It is a portrait of the emotional devastation of what makes up the overwhelming majority of the population in any civil war: those caught in the middle.
The tavern own is representative of the bulk of the population ff the stories of O’Flaherty. He is an Irishman—not a Northern Irishman—who loves Ireland and the Irish. More of his stories about Irish peasants than soldiers and, for that matter, more of stories may be about the animals owned by Irish peasants than anything else. Animals are not directed and motivated by politics and social standing, they act out of primal impulse that is for O’Flaherty an exercise of Nietzschean purity where those who join the herd in heading for a cliff deserve to tumble to their fates and where the strong survive. Do not for a moment that this application of Nietzschean philosophy does not under a process of reverse personification. “The Stream” is a story about a second husband of a pretty young widow who one day follows the herd (his friends) in their mission to hunt for bird eggs precariously located in nests located where? That’s right, on the side of a cliff. And what happens to second husband as a result of his show of weakness in joining the herd rather than rejecting to take care what of should come first? That’s right, he tumbles to his fate.
This is the world Liam O’Flaherty presents in his short stories. A world where the strong should survive as a result of natural order. A world where when the weak survive and the strong die, it is the result of a corruption of the natural order. Nothing produces a stronger emotional reaction among people than witnessing an upsetting of the natural order. It is the very definition of unnatural, whether in the form of a child dying before parents or a clown crying. From the tragic to the absurd, O’Flaherty’s stories are a parade of events in which emotional devastation results from things going off the track off of expectation.
