Flann OBrien, Dickens and Joyce: Form, Identity and Colonial Influence

Flann OBrien, Dickens and Joyce Form, Identity and Colonial Influences all in all quotations from The Third Policeman are taken from the 1993 Flamingo Modern Classic edition.In this essay I intend to examine Flann OBriens The Third Policeman in the context of the time of its writing, 1940, its relation to certain English novelistic traditions and also the broader Irish literary tradition in which it belongs. Seamus Deane refers to Ireland as a Strange clownish and indeed OBriens own narrator recalls the words of his father . . . he would follow Parnell with the customers and say that Ireland was a queer country. (7)Such a concurrence indicates to a degree the peculiar nature of the Irish situation with regard to conjectural post-colonial models. There is a temptation to see all Irish hold since the revival in terms of decolonization. Cahalan, in The Irish Novel, traces the tendency of Irish writers such as Swift, Edgeworth and Maturin to employ fantastic elements and non-realism in direct competition to English colonial models and in affirmation of certain Irish traditions. Mercier, in The Irish Comic Tradition, points also to the presence of exaggeration, absurdity and scatological specific in Gaelic heroic cycles and poetry. In Flann OBrien, Bakhtin, and Menippean Satire, M. Keith Booker begins by faceIt has now become commonplace to think of Flann OBrien along with James Joyce and Samuel Beckett as the three great Irish fiction writers...