The key twist of the novel is that the narrator has been dead for the majority of the book, highlighting Unknowability as Part of the Human Experience. While there are clues throughout, the novel’s uncanny and surreal tone obscures the reality of the narrator’s situation. Further, O’Brien includes misdirection through the narrator’s focus on his physiological reactions and embodied experiences, which suggest his aliveness. 

Chapter 6 includes both a clear clue that the narrator is already dead, and instances of misdirection that suggest the opposite. The narrator, at Joe’s request, asks the Sergeant if it is a joke that he is going to be arrested for murder. The Sergeant replies, “If you take it that way I will be indefinitely beholden to you […] and I will remember you with real emotion. It would be a noble gesture and an unutterable piece of supreme excellence on the part of the deceased’ (101, emphasis added). While the narrator replies “What!” (101), the Sergeant does not further explain his reference to the narrator being deceased, and the narrator does not think more about it. The conversation turns to the narrator’s impending punishment—hanging—and his shock at the “unfairness” of the situation. The narrator’s fear of being “stretched” belies his already-dead state; it shouldn’t matter if he is “killed” if he is already dead. O’Brien thus employs foreshadowing, hinting that the narrator is dead before he admits it to himself.

Throughout the novel, O’Brien also uses physiological descriptions of the narrator’s bodily experience. As he thinks about being killed, the narrator has tears in his eyes and a “lump of incommunicable poignancy” (106) swelling in his throat. The passage recalls the narrator’s insistence earlier in the novel that, while de Selby suggests that journeys are hallucinations, his journey is not because he felt the heat of the sun and the exhaustion of his body from walking. Such vivid physical sensations make the narrator’s state of being alive or dead more ambiguous throughout the novel.

The novel shifts more clearly into surrealism and its afterlife setting in Chapter 8, when the Sergeant takes the narrator through a lane, then down an elevator into “eternity.” The representation of eternity is humorous in evading common tropes associated with heaven, hell, or purgatory. After seeing the map, Joe and the narrator discuss the veracity of the Sergeant’s claims:

In the meantime let us make up our minds that eternity is not up a lane that is found by looking at cracks in the ceiling of a country policeman’s bedroom.

Then what is up the lane?

I cannot say. If he said that eternity was up the lane and left it at that, I would not kick so hard. But when we are told that we are coming back from there in a lift [elevator]—well, I begin to think that he is confusing night-clubs with heaven. A lift! (130).

This passage includes the detail of the ceiling map as the path to eternity, then the portal as a common elevator rather than a mystical portal. The comparison of heaven to a night-club that could be accessed in a lift adds comedy, suggesting that there is something absurd and even anticlimactic about this afterlife. 

Rather than explicit natural images—clouds or fire—for the afterlife, O’Brien’s representation emphasizes machinery, reinforcing The Interchange Between Human and Machine: First the elevator, then the wires and clocks, and then the doors. There are continuing allusions to the narrator’s crime, such as the comparison of the small doors to “ovens or furnace-doors or safe-deposits such as banks have” (135, emphasis added). The imagery of “ovens” and “furnace doors” alludes to the fire- and heat-based imagery commonly associated with hell, while the comparison to “safe-deposits such as banks have” invokes Mathers’s stolen money box. 

Furthermore, the elevator’s own behavior suggests an awareness of the narrator’s guilt. The narrator is warned that if someone doesn’t weigh the same going back up as they did on the way down, the elevator will take them “downward” where none have gone before. This warning against taking the valuable objects that were not originally his onto the elevator once more invokes the theft, while “downward” suggests a descent into hell. In this way, the machinery around the narrator begins to reflect aspects of his own inner state of guilt. 

One of the things the narrator asks to receive in the door is a weapon, and he is given a tool, “That will change any man or men into grey powder at once if you point it and press the knob or if you don’t like grey powder you can have purple powder or yellow powder” (142, emphasis added). This weapon is both hyperbolically fantastical and an example of the closeness between human and machine: The manmade object of the weapon inflicts deadly transformation onto the human body, and “powders” suggest the human body returning to ashes or dust. The colors of the powder also echo Mathers’s earlier dialogue about the “wind colors” present at a person’s birth. Mathers claimed his own color was yellow, which is in turn echoed in the reference to “yellow powder.” The weapon and powder imagery thus once more speak to the idea of violence and guilt, invoking the narrator’s crimes indirectly.