Dialogism in The Dalkey Archive by Flann O’Brien

Abstract

Brian O'Nolan better known by his pen name Flann O'Brien, was an Irish novelist, playwright, and satirist, considered a major figure in twentieth-century literature. Nevertheless, his works have not become a source for major studies. This article deals with Flan O'Brien's novel, The Dalkey Archive (1964), and provides a study based on Bakhtin's theory of dialogism. Like all postmodern texts, the novel is in dialogue not only with the existing literary legacy but various authors as well (f.e. James Joyce, St. Augustine). One of the intertexts is The Third Policeman - a novel written by O'Brien earlier in 1939-40 (not published until 1967) - whose fictional character, the philosopher De Selby, becomes one of the leading figures in the The Dalkey Archives. Thus, ტhe novel creates a unity of polyphonic voices in which the omniscient author has disappeared and the text is created as a mosaic of quotations, creating an ironic-parodic dialogue with the past, that is characteristic of the post-modernist tradition.