On the basis of "The Sniper" how is violence in war self-defeating?I have a project on the above mentioned topic.

It would appear that war is presented in an overwhelmingly
negative fashion in this excellent and shocking short story. The tale presents us with
one principal character who has been transformed through the war that he fights in from
being merely an "ascetic student" to a man whose face possesses the "cold gleam of the
fanatic." He is ranged against an unknown, anonymous opponent that he manages to triumph
over, and yet, as the end of the story shows, this "triumph" is something of a hollow
victory, because of the way in which he responds to the sight of his opponent rolling
off the roof and falling to the ground with a "dull thud." Note how the sniper is shown
to respond to this sight, which should have made him happy, because after all, he was
alive and his enemy, that wanted to kill him, was
not:

The lust
of battle died in him. He became bitten by remorse. The seat stood out in beads on his
forehead. Weakened by his wound and the long summer day of fasting and watching on the
roof, he revolted from the sight of the shattered mass of his dead enemy. His teeth
chattered, he began to gibber to himself, cursing the war, cursing himself, cursing
everybody.

Of course, this
indicates that whilst he may have killed his enemy, he seems to have destroyed something
within himself that is far more important. War is shown to have a massive impact on
those who participate in it. This theme is of course cemented by the discovery of the
identity of the dead enemy. The fact that the other sniper was the protagonist's brother
consolidates the way in which war is self-defeating, for it often causes us to fight
against the things that are most important to us.