| dc.description.abstract | The aim of this thesis is to analyse the connections between comedy and
metafiction evident in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman and
The Hard Life. The following pages discuss how these novels express, utilize, subvert
and explode typical comic discourse within a postmodern paradigm. As works that
contain numerous ontological levels that confuse a reader’s sense of reality, that
foregound their status as art and that take the subject of writing itself as a theme. At
Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman and The Hard Life all explode traditional modes
of representation in general, and the conventional comic vision in particular.
Throughout my discussion, I describe and apply theories of laughter (namely, the
Incongruity, Superiority and Relief theories) to help describe how the humorous aspects
of O’Brien’s work disrupt the reading process and the reader’s expectations o f order and
comfort. I also interrogate other comic/humour devices within O’Brien’s works — such
as puns, which crack language to let words bleed a variety of meanings, and thus reflect
how language is implicit in generating multiple levels of fluid reality.
My rhetorical pattern for this thesis consists of analysing the way O’Brien handles
the mixing of the comic and metafiction from novel to novel — that is, I chart a
progession from the more obvious (At Swim-Two-Birds) to the more subtle (The Third
Policeman) to the well-hidden but certainly still evident and important (The Hard Life). I
show how O’Brien’s subversion of comic discourse creates a vision of a chaotic, plural
reality that is both playful and dark. | |
