The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien
"The Third Policeman" is a novel by Flann O'Brien, the pen name of Irish author Brian O'Nolan, written in 1940 but published posthumously. The story follows an unnamed narrator who, after the death of his parents, returns to his hometown and becomes embroiled in a bizarre sequence of events that begins with the murder of a wealthy man, Phillip Mathers. This act of violence leads to a series of surreal and disorienting experiences, where the narrator confronts a strange reality marked by odd metaphysics, misunderstood identities, and whimsical policemen with peculiar theories. The narrative explores themes of alienation and the absurdity of existence, as the protagonist grapples with his own lack of identity while navigating a nightmarish landscape.
As the plot unfolds, it becomes apparent that the narrator has been dead all along, revealing a cyclical structure to the story that reflects a comic and fantastic vision of the afterlife. O'Brien's work employs a blend of dark humor and philosophical inquiry, challenging conventional ideas of identity and reality. Although it contains elements of Irish culture, the novel's themes resonate universally, making it a significant contribution to modernist literature that transcends its local context. Ultimately, "The Third Policeman" stands as a testament to O'Brien's unique voice and intellectual cosmopolitanism in the realm of fiction.
The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien
First published: 1967
Type of work: Fantasy
Time of work: The late 1930’s
Locale: Rural western Ireland
Principal Characters:
The Narrator , unnamed, who maintains a dialogue with his soul, JoePhillip Mathers , a wealthy victim of murderJohn Dlvney , the accomplice of the narrator in the murder of MathersSergeant Pluck , an apparently omniscient police interrogatorPoliceman MacCruiskeen , a police barracks inventorPoliceman Fox , a phantom investigator, the third policeman
The Novel
As a child, the unnamed narrator of The Third Policeman was sent to boarding school on the death of both his parents. As a young adult, he returns to his hometown, where the meager family farm has been suspiciously mismanaged by a lazy bachelor named John Divney. The fantastic events of the novel, and the narrator’s own relation of his story, begin with the murder of a wealthy old man, Phillip Mathers, by the narrator in the company, and at the instigation, of Divney. While the narrator buries the corpse, Divney hides the cash box they sought. Months later, the pair return to recover the money, at which point the narrator, betrayed by Divney, becomes aware of eerie changes in his surroundings and in his perception of them.
For what appears to be three days, the narrator seeks Divney and the cash box, protests his innocence under police interrogation, and escapes from the police as they plan a scaffold for his execution. Throughout these episodes, the narrator endures a comical but profound disorientation of ordinary experience: Buildings appear to be two-dimensional, bicycles seem alive, and the sun apparently rises and sets in the east. He negotiates these baffling phenomena by adducing quite seriously the baroque and ludicrous metaphysics of a fictional philosopher named de Selby. The absurdity of the narrator’s scholarship is matched by that of the policemen, who are doctrinaire concerning theories about the source of all sickness in teeth, colors in winds, night as a material substance, and the slow but inexorable molecular exchange between bicycles and the persons riding them.
At last, aided by the third policeman, Fox, the narrator locates Divney and is startled to find him now the father of an adolescent son. In a fatal apoplectic fit at the sight of the narrator, Divney confesses to having murdered his co-conspirator when they returned for Mathers’ money box. Throughout the story, the narrator has been dead, and elapsed time is revealed to have been not three days but sixteen years. The novel ends with the narrator and Divney, now both dead, now both known to be murderers, beginning to repeat the novel’s course of events, now seen as a comic and fantastic vision of the afterlife.
The Characters
Fundamental to the predicament of the narrator of The Third Policeman is his lack of name, of living parentage, of acknowledged public identity, and of means adequate to order his mystifying experiences. The fantastic qualities of his environment, and his marginal status as suspected murderer now unrecognized in his hometown, contribute to his profound alienation and growing anxiety. In a reversal of ordinary continuities, the conventional dimension of this character is his soul, Joe, who in this afterlife has a name and evident comfort in his surroundings. While Joe exhibits an unshaken confidence in common sense, the narrator desperately adopts implausible identities such as the definitive annotator of the de Selby codex, an Italian soprano, and a gallant suitor of an ardent bicycle. All of his identities are adopted as a matter of literary style, a function integral to his role as literary narrator, and all fail miserably as defenses against personal chaos.
The policemen suffer no such anxiety. They are unsurprised by incomprehensible developments, and they remain happy in their devotion to even more absurd preoccupations. Sergeant Pluck stands guard against local crime, ordinarily limited to the offense of riding a bicycle without a headlamp. Policeman MacCruiskeen is the contented inventor of nesting Chinese boxes (all the way down to molecular scale) and spears so keen that their points are invisible. Fox, the third to appear and the one essential to the narrator’s cyclic conclusion, wields a mysterious substance called omnium. In complete harmony with this nightmarish milieu, these policemen control their precinct by authoritatively charting meaningless statistics and spinning knobs on inexplicable but impressive contraptions.
Critical Context
The Third Policeman was signed Flann O’Brien, only one of many pen names adopted by an author whose real name was Brian O’Nolan. The novel was written in 1940, rejected by publishers, and put into print only after O’Brien’s death. The author, then, had ample experience in the formation of literary identities and the failures of literary performances, both of which are integral to The Third Policeman.
O’Brien was Irish, and he grew up in a new republic rife with glorified and self-gratifying notions of national identity—a kind of fiction attacked in this novel’s undermining of any conception of certain identity in a malevolent and insensible world. Modern Irish literature is abundant in pride of place, specificity of realistic locale, and documentary versions of domestic politics and small-town life. Although vaguely Irish in setting and humor, The Third Policeman addresses universal, not provincial, experience, and fantastic, not realistic narration. As such, it is a turning away from the conventions of O’Brien’s national literature toward an intellectual cosmopolitanism.
The Third Policeman might have marked O’Brien’s approach to the most sophisticated kind of modernistic fiction. He might have developed subsequently along the lines of another Irishman of his own age and intellectual sensibility, Samuel Beckett. O’Brien did not, whether by personal misfortune or by dissatisfaction with the new literary absorption in existential angst equal to that of any other philosophy. At the end of his life, O’Brien settled for a gross popularization of the conception of The Third Policeman in a far less provocative novel called The Dalkey Archive (1964).
Bibliography
Clissmann, Anne. Flann O’Brien: A Critical Introduction to His Writing, 1975.
Clissmann, Anne, and David Powell, eds. “A Flann O’Brien: Myles na Gopaleen Number,” in Journal of Irish Studies. III, no. I (1974), pp. 3-112.
Kiely, B. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXII (November 12, 1967), p. 1.
O’Keeffe, Timothy, ed. Myles: Portraits of Brian O’Nolan, 1973.
Piggot, Stuart. The Druids, 1968.
Publishers Weekly. Review. CXCII (September 18, 1967), p. 61.