The Third Policeman
52 pages • 1-hour read
Flann O'BrienThe Third Policeman
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Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence and death.
Chapter 1 Summary
The unnamed narrator opens the novel by noting that, “not everybody knows how I killed old Philip Mathers” (7), then quickly suggests that he must first explain his relationship with John Divney, his friend and accomplice in the murder.
The narrator recalls his upbringing in the public house his parents owned, and his close relationship with his mother and distant one with his father. He remembers his parents’ departure one winter, one after the other, and not understanding where they had gone, but that a man in a black suit came for a few days on each instance. He realized later that they had died. He was sent soon after to an expensive boarding school on a scholarship. He noted that his school days are unimportant to the story except for his discovery of the writer de Selby. He came across a first edition of Golden Hours at the age of 16 and stole it when leaving school years later. He did not go home immediately. Divney worked and lived on the farm in the meantime as part of an arrangement the narrator’s father had made before his death.
On his travels, the narrator broke his leg in six places and ended up with a wooden prosthetic. He knew that life would be difficult upon returning to the farm, but was confident his life’s work would not be as a farmer, but as a scholar of de Selby. When the narrator did return, Divney suggested that he would now leave since his work was done, but continually delayed his departure. Divney started to use the words “we” and “our” when talking about the farm and the narrator realized that “even if I did own everything, he owned me” (13). However, Divney’s work on the farm—though not diligent—enabled the narrator to spend most of his time studying de Selby.
Years passed, and Divney and the narrator eventually became “great friends” (13), with the narrator beginning to go everywhere with Divney and sleeping in his bed, although “the situation was a queer one and neither of us liked it” (13). The narrator notes that he and Divney had come to dislike each other, in spite of their friendliness and extreme closeness.
The narrator then describes what happened several years earlier. After finishing a new de Selby index, Divney encourages the narrator to disseminate the work, but the narrator counters that he needs money to do so. Divney replies that he also needs money to marry a girl named Pegeen Meers. In answer to their problems, Divney mentions “old Mathers,” a wealthy neighbor. The narrator is confused at first, then realizes that Divney is planning to rob Mathers. He notes, “I cannot recollect how long it took me to realize that he meant to kill him as well in order to avoid the possibility of being identified as the robber afterwards” (15). The narrator eventually accepts this plan, in part because of Divney’s encouragement that he should bring his de Selby index to a wider audience.
Mathers is known to travel into town with a money box containing £3,000. One night, they set out on their bicycles to meet Mathers on the road. Divney hits Mathers in the back of the neck with an iron bicycle pump, steals the money box, then tells the narrator to finish Mathers off with the spade. The narrator hits Mathers with it until he is tired, then looks up to find Divney gone. Worried, the narrator buries Mathers, and Divney eventually returns, having hidden the money box. Then narrator asks “a hundred times in a thousand different ways” where it is hidden (18), but Divney says that it is safe and that they need to wait until things quiet down to retrieve it.
The narrator then explains that that is the reason he thereafter refused to let Divney out of his sight and they appeared to be great friends. Three years pass before Divney says that it is finally time to retrieve the box. The narrator insists they go together; while Divney is disappointed at his lack of trust, he tells the narrator that the box is hidden under the floorboards in Mathers’s house. They walk together, then Divney sits on a wall outside while the narrator goes to get the box.
Chapter 2 Summary
The narrator reflects on de Selby’s theory that conventional houses are bad for humans as he walks into Mathers’s house. He sees the box where it is supposed to be, but something in the room changes—his light goes out, and the box is suddenly gone. He sees old Mathers sitting in a chair in the corner. The narrator decides to speak to Mathers. He asks questions about things like whether the old man is dead, if the weather is dark, and if he likes tea. Mathers answers everything with a “no.” The narrator eventually gets Mathers to elaborate on his theory that “No is a better word than Yes” (30), because the latter is more likely to lead to sin.
He asks Mathers where the box is, and Mathers asks him his name. He finds that he can’t remember it. Mathers asks the narrator what color he is, then espouses a theory about the importance of the “color” of the prevailing wind at a person’s birth. The conversation is interrupted by statements from a voice that the narrator believes to be his soul, and whom he decides to call “Joe,” for the sake of convenience. “Joe” prompts the narrator with questions to ask, and seems to admire Mathers’s theories: “This is very edifying, every sentence a sermon in itself. Ask him to explain” (34). Mathers says that when he was born, a policeman present watched the wind and made Mathers a thin gown in his color, light yellow. He received another gown from the police each year on his birthday, adding it on top of the previous year’s. He suggests that the collective color darkens over time, and when it achieves blackness, that is the day he will die.
The narrator asks who the policemen are, and is told, “There is Sergeant Pluck and another man called MacCruiskeen and there is a third man called Fox that disappeared twenty-five years ago and was never heard of after” (37), and that the two remaining have been there hundreds of years.
The narrator decides the policemen must be able to tell him where to find the box. He decides he will go there in the morning and report the theft of a nonexistent American gold watch. He asks Mathers if he can sleep in his house for the night, and receives permission to do so.
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
The Third Policeman is told in first person from the perspective of its unnamed protagonist. The fact that the character’s name is never revealed, and that he will eventually claim to have forgotten it, introduces the theme of Unknowability as Part of the Human Experience. The narrator is characterized as intelligent but self-involved; his first defining characteristic is his obsession with the writer de Selby. He learns French and German to read two commentators of the philosopher, which speaks to his single-minded discipline. However, he also steals the copy of the de Selby text he finds at school, which foreshadows how he will eventually go on to commit an even greater crime in his murder of Mathers, driven by a desire to publish his work and achieve recognition for his scholarship.
The first chapter’s tone is primarily realistic, but the text becomes more surreal as the narrative progresses, introducing more elements of confusion and unpredictability into the narrator’s situation and experiences. It alternates between past and present. Situations are often described before the reasons for them are explained. For example, the narrator describes his strange, intimate relationship with Divney in detail before pausing to suggest that he needs to go back several years to explain the reasons for it. This evasion of a clear linear structure creates a sense of disorientation, reinforcing the sense that nothing is as straightforward as it may initially seem.
The narrator’s insistence that he and Divney were close friends who grew to dislike each other introduces ambiguity even into his interpersonal relations. Once the murder is committed, Divney’s behavior shows that he does not trust the narrator and does not really wish to share the proceeds of the crime with him, foreshadowing the revelation at the novel’s end that Divney has killed the narrator with a bomb. The dynamic between the two men thus suggests that there is a degree of unpredictability and unknowability even in seemingly close connections.
The narrator also frequently uses tangents and cliffhangers to heighten the sense of suspense and disorientation. At the end of Chapter 1, when the narrator is about to retrieve Mathers’s money box, he alludes to an upcoming event that will make him forget his name. Chapter 2 then opens not with an answer to the cliffhanger, but with a conversational statement about de Selby’s writings, that he “has some interesting things to say on the subject of houses” (22). This rapid shift in subject matter, especially when introducing seemingly non-related, inconsequential tangents, reflects the narrator’s topsy-turvy experiences.
The narrative style’s emphasis on tangents also aligns with the narrator’s preoccupation with de Selby and his commentators, creating a metatextual layer to the narrative by playing with the ideas of how books are transmitted, read, and interpreted. Flann O’Brien includes footnote citations to de Selby’s works and statements by critics of his work. Those tangential sections of the novel echo the experience of reading literary criticism, with pauses to refer to secondary texts or read explanatory footnotes. This metatextual element gestures toward the shift to Postmodernism; metatextuality became a feature of later Postmodernist texts, such as Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things (1992).
The novel becomes increasingly uncanny in Chapter 2, with the appearance of the murdered Mathers in his house. In addition to the fact that he should be dead, Mathers’s presence increases the novel’s shift toward surrealism because he introduces his theory of wind-watching, birth cloths in a person’s color, and that they foretell when a person will die. Both Mathers’s dialogue and the narrator’s thought process become increasingly convoluted, with the narrator forgetting who he is and beginning to converse with “Joe,” his soul. For the most part, the narrator feels sanguine rather than terrified about the strange events, which contributes to the tone of dark comedy rather than horror.
This section of the novel also represents time as nonlinear experience. The narrator tells the story in reverse order frequently; some periods of time are drastically compressed, whereas others are extended in the narrative space they take up. The narrator also comments on his fluid experiences of time. After the narrator sees Mathers sitting in the corner, “Years or minutes could be swallowed up with equal ease in that indescribable and unaccountable interval” (25). The fluid experience of time foreshadows the reveal that the narrator is experiencing hell in a cyclical, never-ending eternity.
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