Cover of The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien
The Third Policeman was written by Irish author Flann O'Brien (a pseudonym for Brian O'Nolan).
The book is on Desmond's bed in the Swan in Orientation. It was written in 1940 but published posthumously in 1967. The novel gained instant critical acclaim.
The Third Policeman is a story about academic obsession, a fable about crime and punishment, and, according to some, it is even a commentary on Einsteinian physics. The protagonist is tragically orphaned and later sent to boarding school where he first becomes acquainted with the work of the bizarre philosopher, De Selby. Obsessed by the thoughts of De Selby the protagonist sets out on a catastrophic quest to publish a definitive commentary on De Selby. To fund this ambition he plans to murder and rob a rich man.
De Selby is a natural skeptic of all known laws of physics, who casually dismisses the evidence of human experience. He contends, for example, that "the permanent hallucination known conventionally as 'life' is an effect of constantly walking in a particular direction around a sausage-shaped earth, and that night results from 'accumulations of black air'".(Possibly an allusion to the black smoke).
The protagonist finally gets hold of his victims' black box only to discover that the box does not contain money, but “omnium” , a substance once described as: “the essential inherent interior essence which is hidden in the root of the kernel of everything”, and which is literally everything one desires.
The former holder of the box has been using it to take the muck off his leggings and to boil his eggs just right, but naturally the narrator has more grandiose visions of his future omnipotence.
In O'Brien's The Third Policeman, the first two policemen share an underground structure with the narrator, which is eerily similar to the Dharma Bunkers. Without spoiling the ending, the narrator is being punished for his "bad" deeds. One can draw a parallel with this and the new idea that Islanders in danger of being taken by the Others are either "good" or "bad". Are the survivors from the front-end all being punished in much the same way that O'Brien's narrator is?
Author
The author, Flann O'Brien, is an Irish novelist and political commentator. Born in County Tyrone and raised in Dublin, he entered the Irish civil service in 1937 and formally retired in 1953. From 1940 until his death, he wrote a political column called "Cruiskeen Lawn" for The Irish Times, under the pseudonym of Myles na Gopaleen; his biting, satiric commentaries made him the conscience of the Irish government. As Flann O'Brien, he published three wildly funny novels, At Swim—Two—Birds (1939, rep. 1960), The Dalkey Archive (1964), and The Third Policeman (1967), and well as Faustus Kelly (1943), a play.
Relations To Lost
While many possible connections have been hashed out below, a lot are tenuous at best. This section is concerned with elements of the book which have a strong similarity events in LOST - and to present the possible "ammunition" referenced by the writers.
- Policeman MacCruiskeen and his partner are obsessed with taking readings from their underground bunker, and assuring that these readings are within "safe" ranges. They are constantly having to adjust the readings into these safe ranges - and we find out later in the novel that the "third policeman" himself (Policeman Fox) has in fact been constantly modifying these readings into the unsafe range for his own entertainment.
- This sounds very similar to what happens in the hatch as far as resetting the clock every 108 minutes - combined with what we learn in The Pearl
- On one of the occasions when Policeman Fox modifies the readings into the unsafe range he either purposefully or unpurposefully saves the narrator from being hanged by Policeman MacCruiskeen as he suddenly has to attend to lowering the readings.
- When Desmond forgot to press the button he inadvertenly crashes Oceanic Flight 815 - their radio had already gone out 6 hours before this so could he have been in fact saving them from some more terrible fate?
Possible Lost Connections
The third policeman as seen when Desmond is fleeing the hatch.
Below is an analysis of the book along with Lost connections, from http://www.losttv-forum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7600
STATEMENT AT THE START OF THE BOOK:
Human existence being a hallucination containing in itself the secondary hallucinations of day and night (the latter an insanitary condition of the atmosphere due to accretions of black air) it ill becomes any man of sense to be concerned at the illusory approach of the supreme hallucination known as death.
LOST REFERENCES: Locke giving Boone something to make him “hallucinate”; and we have seen other dreamlike sequences that could also be inferred as hallucinations – Jack seeing his dead father; Shannon (and even Sayid) seeing Walt in the jungle; Hurley dreaming about the food. Also note the reference to “accretions of black air” – possibly the black smoke floating around the island.
WHISPERING REFERENCES:
BOOK Page 18: “The only reply he gave me was to put the finger up to his lip more firmly and make a long hissing noise. He gave me to understand that mentioning the box, even in a whisper, was the most foolish and reckless thing it was possible for me to do.”
BOOK Page 108: “I could not make it out…I have been listening to shouts and screams for years but I can never surely catch the words. Would you say that he said: Don’t press so hard?” - he is trying to figure out what the unearthly voices said to him…these voices are hard to understand.
LOST REFERENCES: Some of the survivors have heard whispering voices in the jungle and can’t always make out what they say; Shannon sees Walt in the jungle, and Walt whispers for her to be quiet and puts his finger up to his mouth and then whispers something we can’t understand; but some have played this audio backwards and Walt is saying something about “pressing a button.”
HATCH REFERENCES:
BOOK Page 18: “It (the box) was in a very safe place….It would be found all in good time.”
LOST REFERENCES: The hatch?
BOOK Page 131: Describing what it looks like after they go down the long, narrow shaft to get underground: “I saw a long passage lit fitfully at intervals by the crude home-made noise machines….the walls of the passage seemed to be made with bolted sheets of pig-iron…there was a mass of wires and what appeared to be particularly thick wires or possibly pipes….here I saw a dial or an intricate nest of clocks and knobs resembling a control board…”
LOST REFERENCES: After going down the hatch they have to walk through passages that are dark and barely lit and had lots of pipes…when you get closer to Desmond’s apartment…the computer is there, and the countdown clock with 108.
BOOK Page 133: “Why do you call it eternity?....because you don’t grow old here. When you leave here you will be the same age as you were coming in and the same stature and latitude. There is an eight-day clock here with a patent balanced action but it never goes.”
BOOK Page 134: The book describes how you can walk throughout the underground ‘eternity’ and you can walk on and on until you reach the next room, but you will always find yourself in the same place. “If you want to take another walk ahead to reach the same place here without coming back you can walk on till you reach the next doorway…but it will do you no good and even if we stay here behind you it is probable that you will find us there to meet you.”
LOST REFERENCES: I am still wondering if the hatch is tied to time / existence.
HATCH/TORCHLIGHT REFERENCES:
BOOK Page 181-182: They enter another house/habitat through a small, shaft opening: “He turned sharply into a gap in the hedge and led the way into shrubberies an dpast the boles of dark forbidding trees…where branches and tall growings filled the darkness and flanked us closely on both sides, reminding me of my journey to the underground heaven of Sergeant Pluck…He flashed a torch on it…he began putting his immense body in through the tiny opening…then he sent the torchlight back at me to show the way…he led the way along a passage still narrower…his face turned still ahead towards the guidance of his torch. We went through another door at the top of the stairs and I found myself in a very surprising apartment.”
LOST REFERENCES: This description is similar to the doors on the hatches on the island, surrounded/hidden by shrubbery and trees. When our survivors were entering the hatch after using the dynamite, they used torches to peer down the long dark shaft…and after getting to the bottom of the shaft, the passageways eventually lead to Desmond’s apartment.
MORE THAN ONE BED IN HATCH REFERENCES:
BOOK Page 152: “I notice the other bed has been slept in….That would likely be Policeman Fox…MacCruiskeen and I do not do our sleeping here at all, it is too expensive, we would be dead in a week if we played that game.” He goes on to say that he sleeps down in the underground “habitat.” He explains why: “To save our lifetimes…Down there you are as young coming out of a sleep as you are going into it and you don’t fade when you are inside your sleep…”
LOST REFERENCES: The extra bunk bed in Desmond’s hatch doesn’t look like it has been slept in.
LIFT REFERENCES:
BOOK Page 23: “I lifted it up, laid it aside and struck a match…”
BOOK Page 126: “…eternity was up the lane and left it at that…we are coming back (from eternity) in a ‘lift’…A lift!”
BOOK Page 136: “Then we’ll all lift it out”
BOOK Page 140: “the simple thing is…you cannot enter the lift unless you weigh the same weight as you weighed when you weighed into it…if you do, it will extirpate you unconditionally and kill the life out of you.”
LOST REFERENCES: When the open the hatch and look inside using a torch/fire to see in there. Also a “lift it up” reference here from when Desmond tells Jack “well, you may have to lift it up.” And it’s interesting to think about this whole statement of entering the ‘lift’ to leave the underground ‘eternity’. May also have a connection to the conversation between Arzt and Hurley, in which he asks him how he doesnt appear to have lost any weight.
MONSTER/CLICKING SOUND REFERENCES:
BOOK Page 130: When The characters are on their way down the shaft to ‘eternity’, the main character is told to wait to hear a clicking sound. “Click! It came at last, sharp and terrible. Almost at once the falling changed, either stopping altogether or becoming a much slower falling…we are there now…That was the lift.”
LOST REFERENCES: The monster on LOST makes a loud, clicking sound.
MAP REFERENCES:
BOOK Page 123: “A map!...When I looked carefully at the ceiling I saw that Mr. Mathers’ house and every road and house I knew were marked there, and nets of lanes and neighbourhoods that I did not know also. It was a map of the parish, complete, reliable, and astonishing…And he lay looking at the map for five years more before he saw that it showed the way to eternity.”
LOST REFERENCES: Maps? The map that Danielle had? The Blast Door Map? Or possibly the mural in the hatch is really a map…it does have a house drawn on it.
JACK AND KATE REFERENCES:
BOOK Page 19-20: “We (stressing that both men would do this together) will get the box…both of us should finish what the two of us started.”
LOST REFERENCES: Jack and Kate go to get the suitcase with the guns in it – Jack stresses that they will open it TOGETHER…and later says they need to finish what they started.
MURAL REFERENCES:
BOOK Page 21: “..crude drawings…roofless houses…houses without walls…habitat…being surrounded by a diminutive moat or pit bearing some resemblance to military latrines…”
LOST REFERENCES: Mural on the wall shows “crude drawings” which include a picture of a house. Also, the hatch is sort of surrounded by a moat now that Boone and Locke dug it up.
SICKNESS REFERENCES
BOOK Page 54: “Nearly every sickness is from the teeth.” – this is brought up again multiple times throughout the story.
LOST REFERENCES: There is some sort of ‘sickness’ on the island.
VINCENT REFERENCES:
BOOK Page 8: “Always it was only the drone of his voice I heard, never the separate bits of words. He was a man who understood all dogs thoroughly and treated them like human beings.”
BOOK Page 40: “All people have names of one kind or another…some clue as to the parents of the person named….Even a dog has a name which dissociates him from other dogs and indeed my own soul…”
LOST REFERENCE: Vincent and Walt? Vincent and his owner, Brian?
DEAD PEOPLE REFERENCES:
BOOK Page 8: “My mother was the first to go and I can remember a fat man with a red face and a black suit telling my father there was no doubt where she was, that he could be as sure of that as he could of anything else in this vale of tears. But he did not mention where and as I thought the whole thing was very private and that she might be back on Wednesday, I did not ask him where.”
LOST REFERENCE: Where do people go when they die? Are they really dead?
BOOK Page 9: “All my people were dead…”
LOST REFERENCE: Danielle said something similar to this when telling Sayid about her “people.”
BOOK Page 24: “The man was old Mathers.” – so this guy in the book comes across the guy he killed…except, he is not dead now…he is alive!
LOST REFERENCE: Jack seeing his dad…he knows his dad is dead, so why is he seeing him alive on the island?
HURLEY REFERENCES:
BOOK Page 9: “…an office full of solicitors…I had never met these solicitors…but they were really all working for me…”
LOST REFERENCES: After winning the lottery, Hurley owned all sorts of companies that he never knew about, never met the people, but yet they were all working for him. (i.e. the box company that Locke worked at; the Canadian sneaker factory – which I believe ties in to Ethan who said he was from Canada and was wearing sneakers when they killed him)
ACCIDENT REFERENCES:
BOOK Page 9: “I met one night with a bad accident. I broke my left leg (or, if you like, it was broken for me)” Note: this prevented the guy in the book from going straight home, he had to spend time recuperating.
LOST REFERENCES: Michael broke his leg, and had to spend time recuperating, which prevented him from going to get Walt. This also ties in to the whole “leg” thing which both Locke and Sarah losing use of their legs at one point in time in their lives.
DRINKING/WATER REFERENCES:
BOOK Page 12: “The Wrastler. If you drank three or four pints of it, it was nearly bound to win. The customers praised it highly and when they had it inside them they sang and shouted and sometimes lay down on the floor or on the roadway outside in a great stupor. Some of them complained afterwards that they had been robbed while in this state…”
LOST REFERENCES: Drinking something can take people out of their senses for a short time; there are many drinking references on LOST, the juice on the airplane being shoved down everyone’s throats; the water on the island; Desmond giving Jack something to drink out of his water bottle.
WATCHING/MONITORING REFERENCES:
BOOK Page 13: “I…took the trouble to sleep only after he was sleeping and to be wide awake a good hour before he stirred. Once I nearly failed in my watchfulness. I remember waking up with a start in the small hours of a black night…”
LOST REFERENCES: Desmond has a morning routine where he wakes up early and must log on to the computer…it appears that he must do this every day or something bad will happen.
SMELL REFERENCES:
BOOK Page 139: “A smell? A smell is the most complicated phenomenon in the world…and it cannot be unraveled by the human snout or understood properly although dogs have a better way with smells than we have.”
LOST REFERENCES: When Jack is in the hospital with Sarah right after her surgery, she makes a point of telling him over and over again how much he ‘smells’…also, let’s keep Vincent the dog in mind here since there is a mention of dogs being able to smell better than humans.
TIME REFERENCES:
BOOK Page 23: “…the universe stand-still for an instant, suspending the planets in their courses, halting the sun and holding in mid-air any falling thing the earth was pulling towards it.”
LOST REFERENCES: The drawing of the Sun on the mural; Could time be standing still while the survivors are on the island? The sun is also drawn on the mural in the hatch.
BOOK Page 142: After the characters leave the underground ‘eternity’ they make the following comment on how nothing has changed since they went down…it was like time stood still: “It was two or three hour since the Sergeant and I had started on our journey yet the country and the trees and all the voices of everything around still wore an air of early morning…nothing had yet grown or matured and nothing begun had yet finished.”
LOST REFERENCES: It has been noted that Kate got back to the beach really quick after leaving the hatch to go get Sayid to help…how did she make it back that fast, unless maybe time was standing still inside the hatch?
BOOK Page 144: “I had been in the next world yesterday.”
LOST REFERENCES: Time / existence theory?
EYE REFERENCES
BOOK Page 24-25: “But the eyes were horrible. Looking at them I got the feeling that they were not genuine eyes at all but mechanical dummies animated by electricity or the like, with a tiny pinhole in the center of the ‘pupil’ through which the real eye gazed out secretively…the real eye and as to whether, indeed, it was real at all or merely another dummy with its pinhole on the same plane as the first one so that the real eye, possibly behind thousands of these absurd disguises, gazed out through a barrel of serried peep-holes.” - he is describing how the guy he killed looks…now that he is seeing him alive again.
BOOK Page 43: “They were very unusual eyes. There was no palpable divergence in their alignment but they seemed to be incapable of giving a direct glance at anything that was straight…”
LOST REFERENCES: The eye seems to be important on this show…so many episodes opened up with the camera focusing on the eye/pupil.
TWIN REFERENCES
BOOK Page 25: “In my distress I thought to myself that perhaps it was his twin brother.” - referring to the guy he killed…who is now alive again. However, moments later, his soul speaks to him and points out that it cannot be a “twin” of this guy because you can see the wounds and bandages in the places where this guy was hurt when he killed him…and after this, the man realizes: “he was the man I had murdered beyond all question.”
LOST REFERENCES: Some theories on LOST include the theory of twins…I think this clue may eliminate the ‘twin’ theory on LOST.
DESMOND REFERENCES
BOOK Page 31: “What is your name?...I could not answer it. I did not know my name, did not remember who I was.”
LOST REFERENCES: At first, when Locke asks Desmond his name, he seems to pause like he is having a hard time remembering his name (but alas, on LOST he does eventually remember his name is Desmond).
108 COUNTDOWN REFERENCES
BOOK Page 164: In the book, apparently the policemen have to keep doing something with a “lever” to keep something bad from happening. At one point in the book something goes wrong with the lever and they have to rush to correct it before it is too late: “We were just in time with the lever…it took our combined strengths and three pages of calculations and rough-work but we go the reading down in the nick of zero-hour…” And later in the book, we find out that someone is actually controlling these readings sending them up and down to scare the guys who think they have to keep them at a certain level.
LOST REFERENCES: The computer and the inputting of numbers to reset the 108 clock countdown.
16 YEARS REFERENCES
BOOK Page 128: "He stood there with his back to me examining the panels. There were two of them, tiny things like matchboxes, and the figure sixteen could be seen in one and ten in the other."
BOOK Page 197: At the end of the book , we find out the main character has been dead throughout this story and he says: “I was dead for sixteen years.”
LOST REFERENCES: Danielle has been on the island for 16 years. Also the Losties have been theorized dead since LOST begin in 2004 (though a Purgatory Theory has been debunked)