'Here Is A Nice Piece of Law and Order for you': The Parody of Law in the Nonsensical World of Fann O'Brien.

The Third Policeman by Flann O’ Brien was written in 1940 but published posthumously in 1967 to critical acclaim. A fable on the absurdity of legal bureaucracy as well as a parodical allegory of everyman’s destiny, the book displays a unique mixture of literary genres, from the detective to the regional novel, from the criminal autobiography to the gothic romance where the picaresque protagonist wandering in the Irish countryside turns up to be a dead man at the end of the story. The relationship between human law and God’s law is stretched to grotesque in the tragic as well as a hilarious representation of human destiny. While men’s personality gets mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle, it is the policemen who are in charge of the law of eternity. Through a play with intertextuality which strikes the reader as unmistakably Sternean, the unavoidable presence of death stresses the rushing rhythm of a dance macabre.