ABSTRACT
In one of the most striking opening lines for a novel, the narrator of Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman begins by explaining that not everyone knows how he had killed old Phillip Mathers, ‘smashing his jaw in with my spade’. After many perambulations around the mythic Irish countryside, time comes full circle, and we learn how the main characters will be locked into a repetitive time-world that will go on forever. ‘Is it about a bicycle?’ asks the wide Sergeant Pluck with the violent red moustache, and tufted brows, and fat folds of skin. Indeed it is, for the bicycle is at the centre of the sergeant's theory about shaping and self-shaping, about how what we do affects ourselves, and about how our world affects us in return.
