The Third Policeman

The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien
(As seen in Episode 301: Man of Science, Man of Faith)

I'm going to try and read most of the books on Lostpedia's literary works list. I've already read a few, including Bad Twin, but this is the first formal exercise in my own little Lost Book Club. SPOILER ALERT: If you want to not be lazy and actually read the book, stop now.

Flann O’Brien’s posthumously released second novel is an absurdist tale of existentialism. If that doesn’t get you excited, then you are clearly not a fan of Lost. This obtuse morality tale follows the travails of a nameless protagonist after he and his friend John Divney casually conspire, and then brutally enact a murder for the vague riches of a countryside neighbor named Mathers.

Following the murder, Divney sends his accomplice on a mission to obtain the stolen goods from their hiding place and is distracted upon entering Mathers shack by the ghost of Mathers himself. This is where things get a little confusing, and, as a result, very interesting.

Our nameless protagonist (let’s call him NP for short) goes on a journey the following morning where he happens upon a two-dimensional police station. Inside the station, he comes across two idiosyncratic officers: Seargean Pluck and Policeman MacCruiskeen, both of whom have fascinations with bicycles and speak only to confuse. From the building to the things and people inside it, NP is introduced to one irrationality after the other.

Eventually the two policemen lead him to an underground cavern known as “Eternity,” where time stands still. There he is also introduced to a famed black box, where any object you think of can be fashioned. Eventually, after narrowly escaping his hanging (a punishment for his crime of murder), he returns to the Mathers house where he comes across the third policeman, Fox, who oddly enough has the face of the old man Mathers.

Fox tells NP that the black box which Divney originally sent him off to look for is at his home, so he returns there. Upon doing so, he comes across Divney, who has aged a full twenty years, despite the fact that NP has only been gone a few days. Upon seeing NP, Divney goes into shock, for the black box NP originally sought contained not money but a bomb. He is, in fact, dead. Divney can’t handle the fact that he sees his dead old friend and dies himself right on the spot. The two eventually walk back toward the police station together, with little knowledge of why they were doing so and no recollection of the previous cycle.

Hopefully the parallels to the world of Lost are readily apparent, but if not, let me extrapolate…

Time and the illusion of its passing
As seen in episode 403, “The Economist,” there is a clear difference between time off the island and time on the island. There have been hints to this fact before: Walt is noticeably older/taller; Mittelos Biosciences, the Others’ front company, is an anagram for “Lost Time”; an Other who guarded Karl’s torture chamber was seen reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief HIstory of Time. So how far off is island time from the rest of the world? Probably not 20 years, but there is still an obvious disconnect.

The Black Box
The big prize in Eternity was the black box which contained omnium, a substance that could become anything you wanted it to be. Might this be the same thing that Ben once spoke of in “The Man From Tallahassee”? How else might we explain the existence of Locke’s dad on the island?

Ghosts
NP is literally haunted by his past and the mistakes he made. The “ghost” of Mathers has a long discussion with him, then he is disturbed by the visage of Mathers in the form of policeman Fox. Mathers’ shack also resembles that of Jacob’s, at least in terms of its spiritual properties.

Metaficion
Throughout the book, there are countless footnotes which expound upon the theories of a scientist/philosopher/wacko named de Selby, a man whom is highly esteemed by NP himself. NP often quotes de Selby and his teachings. The footnotes speak to those, but they also tell the reader more about de Selby as a person. This play on non/fiction is an obvious model for Lost’s storytelling across multiple planes: internet games, fake commercials, in-world fiction.

Existentialism
A philosophy that puts the weight of morality and the meaning of life squarely on the shoulders of humanity rather than some nebulous god, Existentialism weighs heavy in The Third Policeman and on Lost. Themes of personal responsibility and self-discovery are paramount to the understanding of both book and show. The battle between existentialist thought and rationalism or empiricalism is a perfect analogy for the battle of science and faith embodied by Jack and Locke.

Key excerpt: Chapter IV opener
Finally, I leave you with the most intriguing passage, at least in terms of Lost, in the entire book. It immediately made me think back to my favorite episode from season 3, the Desmond-centric “Flashes Before Your Eyes.” Oh, and there aren’t any paragraph breaks because that’s how the book is:

Of all the many striking statements made by de Selby, I do not think that any of them can rival his assertion that ‘a journey is a hallucination.’ The phrase may be found in the Country Album cheek by jowel with the well-known treatise on ‘tent-suits,’ those egregious canvas garments which he designed as a substitute alike for the hated houses and ordinary clothing. His theory, insofar as I can understand it, seems to discount the testimony of human experience and is at variance with everything I have learnt myself on many a country walk. Human existence de Selby has defined as ‘a succession of static experiences each infinitely brief,’ a conception which he is thought to have arrived at from examining some old cinematograph films which belonged probably to his nephew. From this presence he discounts the reality or truth of any progression or serialism in life, denies that time can pass as such in the accepted sense and attributes to hallucinations the commonly experienced sensation of progression as, for instance, in journeying from one place to another or even ‘living.’ If one is resting at A, he explains, and desires to rest in a distant place B, one can only do so by resting for infinitely brief intervals in innumerable intermediate places. Thus there is no difference essentially between what happens when one is resting at A before the start of the ‘journey’ and what happens when one is ‘en route,’ i.e., resting in one or another of the intermediate places. He treats of these ‘intermediate places’ in a lengthy footnote. They are not, he warns us, to be taken as arbitrarily-determined points on the A-B axis so many inches or feet apart. They are rather to be regarded as points infinitely near each other yet sufficiently far apart to admit of the intersection between them another series of ‘intermediate’ places, between each of which must be imagined a chain of other resting-places—not, of course, strictly adjacent but arranged so as to admit the application of this principle indefinitely. The illusion of progression he attributes to the inability of the human brain—‘as at present developed‘—to appreciate the reality of these separate ‘rests,’ preferring to group many millions of them together and calling the result motion, an entirely indefensible and impossible procedure since even two separate positions cannot obtain simultaneously of the same body. Thus motion is also an illusion. He mentions that almost any photograph is conclusive proof of his teachings.