The Third Policeman
52 pages • 1-hour read
Flann O'BrienThe Third Policeman
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Chapters 9-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence and death.
Chapter 9 Summary
The narrator wakes to the sound of hammering. In several heavily footnoted passages, he thinks about de Selby’s ideas of paradise being “not unassociated with water” (155). The hammering prompts a footnote about de Selby’s experiments, many of which were loud and involved water.
The narrator eventually hears the sound of rain and looks outside. A man is hammering, building the scaffold to hang the narrator. Joe notices that the man dropped the hammer on his foot but had no reaction. The man introduces himself as “O’Feersa, the middle brother” (154). The narrator asks if he has a wooden leg, and the man shows that he does by hitting it with the hammer. The narrator asks if he knows Martin Finnucane, and he says they are almost related, “but not completely” (154). Joe says he should send a note asking for help. He writes one and gives it to O’Feersa to give to Martin Finnucane.
Chapter 10 Summary
When the narrator wakes up again, the Sergeant comes in. The narrator asks who slept in the other bed, and Pluck says it was Policeman Fox. The narrator asks again about why Fox is known as eccentric. The sergeant explains that he looked into a box in MacCruiskeen’s room, which contained an indescribable color.
The Sergeant sees a note on the table and rushes toward it. It is from Policeman Fox, and says: “One-legged men on their way to rescue prisoner” (162). The Sergeant and the narrator go outside and stand side- by-side on the gallows, looking out over the landscape. The narrator begins to accept that he is going to die and thinks about becoming a part of the natural world. Joe tells him he is going to have to leave him soon, but thanks the narrator for their time together.
The Sergeant grabs the narrator to start the process of hanging him. The narrator then sees the one-legged men coming. They also see MacCruiskeen racing toward them on his bicycle. He yells that the lever is at “nine point six nine” (168); the Sergeant pales, tells the narrator to wait, and jumps onto the bicycle and departs with MacCruiskeen. The narrator nearly collapses. He goes back into the kitchen of the barracks, exhausted.
MacCruiskeen comes back and says that they got the lever reading back down, with great difficulty. He says that the Sergeant is waiting with a group of newly deputized citizens, planning to ambush the one-legged men when they arrive. The narrator asks if the one-legged men will win, and MacCruiskeen says they will not. He plans to paint his bicycle the “brain-destroying” color hidden in the box in his bedroom and return to the ambush, where the Sergeant and his men are wearing protective blindfolds.
Chapters 9-10 Analysis
Compared to Chapter 8, which is lengthy and focused on the action of the narrator’s visit to “eternity,” Chapter 9 is both very brief and includes very little action. It features instead an extended description of de Selby’s theories of eternity as related to water, once more invoking Unknowability as Part of the Human Experience. The theory is convoluted and actually has very little to do with heaven or the afterlife; instead, both the prose and the footnotes focus on the lack of clarity in de Selby’s writings, the extreme water experiments he conducted, and the legal trouble he faced as a result, including “water-wastage hearings” (152).
O’Brien builds suspense and tension by opening the chapter with a curiosity-inciting detail (that the narrator wakes to the sound of hammering) then delaying the reveal of what the sound actually is (the building of the gallows to hang the narrator). The form of the chapter reflects the narrator’s declining mental state: After the visit to eternity, he can’t face reality and comforts himself by thinking about de Selby.
The chapter is also a key example of the novel’s stream of consciousness writing style. Influenced by Modernist James Joyce, O’Brien details the thought processes of the narrator throughout the book. These are often nonlinear and detailed, but they are followed closely. This allows the reader to experience the narrator’s thoughts as he thinks them. For example, O’Brien includes the moment when the narrator’s thought process shifts from de Selby to his actual situation: “Water? The word was in my ear as well as in my brain” (153). The reflective sections of Chapter 9 therefore exemplify both the narrator’s self-protective mental state and O’Brien’s writing style.
The chapter includes several important examples of simile. Similes are used for comedic and emotional effect throughout the novel as the narrator wrestles with The Agony of Banality and Bureaucracy while facing his potential execution. For example, at a critical emotional moment, the narrator realizes his “seven true brothers” with one leg are coming to save him, and the Sergeant says they will go out and look. The narrator pays close attention to the Sergeant’s manner of speaking: “Each word seemed to rest on a tiny cushion and was soft and far away from every other word. When he had stopped speaking there was a warm enchanted silence as if the last note of some music too fascinating almost for comprehension had receded” (162). In this instance, the use of similes reflects the importance of the moment for the narrator: He is on the knife edge of hope, wondering if Martin Finnucane and the other one-legged men can save him, or whether the Sergeant will succeed in hanging him.
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