Inlay

The nameless narrator of The Third Policeman is in hell not only for the sin of murder but also for the sin of pride that led to it. Pride is defined in the Catholic Catechism as undue self-esteem that seeks attention and honour and sets a person in competition with God. Tempted by Divney (an fear dubh, Irish for the devil), the narrator kills Phillip Mathers for his money, to finance the publication of his edition of all known commentaries on the outlandish theories of the scientist-philosopher de Selby, the idol with whom he is obsessed. The book is intended to gain fame and fortune for himself and immortality for the savant. When the unrepentant murderer is blown up by a bomb planted by Divney which he believes to be Mathers’s cashbox, he immediately finds himself condemned to a hell of his own making. Mirroring the fact that what landed the narrator there was his obsession with editing a book about a deluded scientist, O’Brien turns the instruments of his punishment, Sergeant Pluck and Policeman MacCruiskeen, into elaborate caricatures of, respectively, a well-known editor (R.M. Smyllie of the Irish Times) and a famous scientist (Erwin Schrödinger, professor of theoretical physics at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies). O’Brien knew both men socially, but he did not hide the fact that he saw Smyllie as a pompous windbag, and Schrödinger – from his own perspective as a life-long Catholic who believed in salvation and damnation – as a Godless, potentially sinful speculative thinker. Both men were avid cyclists. In The Third Policeman, the bloated policemen’s obsession with bicycles and bicycle pumps reflects both the inflated nature of their personalities, which mirror the inflated ego of the narrator himself, and the cyclical, closed nature of the hell (which ‘goes round and round’) to which the latter has been condemned.