'Not quite dead but definitely queer': Flann O'Brien’s Thanatophiliac Characters

This article describes the extent to which Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman and other works offer a twofold movement of resistance by relying on a meticulous construction of strangeness articulated through oblique elaborations on non-existence, violence and death. The first movement is grounded in history and criticises the stifling nationalist environment of the newly independent Ireland. The second aims to underline the dubious transient ephemeral nature of all entities – be they abstract or concrete, linguistic or biological. The use of hyperbole and strange baroque similes to blur the line between reality and fiction, genuine and fake, alive and dead also serves the same twofold goal of, on the one hand, satirising a country pretending to be what it is not – pure, virtuous, lively and Gaelic – and on the other, of (re-)asserting the intrinsic uncanniness of what is usually taken for granted – sense and meaning, identities, usual physical or metaphysical landmarks.Establishing a new typology of characters in O’Brien’s work (the undead or thanatophilic), this study reassesses the thematic importance of death in its general architecture. After scrutinizing problematic echoes of Heidegger’s notion of angst, it considers the hybridity of fictional elements oscillating between the animate and the inanimate via Masahiro Mori’s ‘uncanny valley.’ The uncanny in O’Brien’s work is provoked by an implicit persistent undoing of the subject revealing a hauntingly nihilistic subtext.