Consciousness as a Bridge between Worlds : The Fantastic Effects of The Third Policeman

Sammanfattning: Abstract This essay explores Tzvetan Todorov’s theories on the fantastic and aims to give an analytical description of the cognitive processes of the reader of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman upon encountering story elements that appear to defy natural laws. According to Todorov, the genre of the fantastic hinges on the reader’s “hesitation” when he tries to make sense of the supernatural element(s) in context of the novel; he hesitates while trying to decide whether there is a natural explanation for these events or whether the world of the narrative has entered what may be called the realm of the imaginary, the world of the marvelous, or a(n im)possible world. The purpose of this thesis is to understand the effects on reading when a reader is faced with a text where the storyworld remains ambiguous in terms of its genre. Through the effects of the fantastic, I argue, the reader is urged to leave the external storyworld of the text and finds refuge instead in the internal consciousness of the narrator-character. Keywords: The fantastic, cognitive narratology, storyworld, the supernatural, hesitation, suspension of disbelief, poetic faith, immersion, attribution theory, emotion theories.