The Third Policeman (English)

Originally submitted and rejected for publication in 1940, this brilliant absurdist novel by Brian O'Nolan (writing as Flann O'Brien) was not published until 1967, a year after the author's death. Parts of it appeared in his 1964 novel, THE DALKEY ARCHIVE. The nameless, one-legged narrator and another man, John Divney, plot to kill their neighbor Philip Mathers and steal his moneybox. The narrator intends to use his share of the ill-gotten gains to fund research into the work of de Selby, a philosopher who rejects most of the basic principles of existence (life, darkness, etc.) as illusion. Tasked with collecting the moneybox after the murder, the narrator embarks upon a bizarre, hallucinatory journey through an afterlife populated with two policemen obsessed with bicycles and their theft. minimize