50 pages • 1 hour read
The Third Man
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Symbols & Motifs
The Vienna Ferris Wheel
The Prater is a Vienna amusement park, and its principal feature is the great Ferris wheel. In his opening meditation on the landscape, Calloway remarks on “the Russian zone where the Prater lay smashed and desolate and full of weeds, only the Great Wheel revolving slowly over the foundations of merry-go-rounds like abandoned millstones, the rusting iron of smashed tanks which nobody had cleared away, the frost-nipped weeds where the snow was thin” (2). Though the wheel remains, the park itself is “desolate” and surrounded by the reminders of war, with nothing in bloom.
Martins chooses this area to meet with Lime after learning that his friend faked his own death. Lime, too, alludes to the changes in the city, saying, “Lovers used to do this in the old days, but they haven’t the money to spare, poor devils, now, and he looked out of the window of the swaying rising car at the figures diminishing below with what looked like genuine commiseration” (68). The Prater, then, symbolizes Vienna’s desolation, smashed by the failure of the Nazis and the subsequent Allied invasion. The wheel makes the city visible and shrinks its occupants. Lime compares the people to “black flies,” asking, “Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving—for ever?” (69). Lime uses the wheel’s vantage point to argue his own superiority, making himself more like God.
Music
Harry Lime’s “signature tune” is one of the first memories Martins shares with Calloway. The naive Martins cites it as proof of his friend’s musical genius, claiming that it was an original composition. Calloway, for his part, knows that someone else wrote it but declines to shatter Martins’s boyhood illusions—an empty gesture given that Martins’s innocence will be shattered in more profound ways later. The musical motif likely appears in the story because the film used a signature musical theme. It later appeared in radio dramas about Harry Lime.
The music returns to Martins in a dream, as he imagines Lime is alive because he hears it. Significantly, Martins wakes soon after this, summoned to the first meeting with a friend of Lime’s, which will officially launch his investigation. Their shared remembrance of the song is one of the stories about him that Martins tells Anna Schmidt; Martins somehow hopes that this is the “right gambit” to win her over into loving him instead of Lime. Lime whistles the tune to alert Martins to his presence near the Prater Ferris Wheel, and it reminds Martins of how “life had always quickened when Harry came” (68), evoking his nostalgia and loyalty. Lime whistles it again to alert Martins to his location in the sewers, dying slowly from his wounds. By this time, Martins himself calls it “the absurd scrap of a tune I’d been fool enough to believe he’d written himself” (78). His lack of faith in it, and the end of his emotional attachment to it, signals the depth of his disillusionment.
Literary Genres and Reader Expectations
Rollo Martins writes Westerns and openly connects his genre of choice to the adventure he’s on. He tells Crabbin, the British Cultural Relations Society representative, that he’s “gunning just the same way for Colonel Callaghan” (15) as his protagonist was for a corrupt sheriff. His misnaming his adversary may signify his ineptitude. He imagines himself a lone vigilante, defending Lime from law enforcement officials who don’t truly know him. Calloway is similarly aware of the genre politics of his own tale, warning the reader that it is “an ugly story if you leave out the girl: grim and sad and unrelieved if it were not for that absurd episode of the British Cultural Relations Society lecturer” (3). Unlike Martins, Calloway always knew what kind of story he was in, with no illusions to shatter. He indirectly alludes to the detective novel when he calls Martins an “amateur” who has certain investigative advantages via his personal relationship to Lime.
Martins becomes engaged in a lengthy consideration of literature while impersonating the famous and renowned writer Benjamin Dexter. Rather than admit to the error in identity or let Crabbin speak instead, Martins defends his own genre. When Crabbin disparages Zane Grey as an “entertainer,” Martins retorts, “What was Shakespeare?” (46). He finds himself “making an enormous impression” (46) when he says that he’s never heard of James Joyce, so he can’t compare the two authors. Though Calloway calls the episode comedic, it illustrates Martins’s character: He’s a writer but isn’t interested in canonical texts or scholarly ideas of greatness and is willing to defend popular entertainment even when it makes him look ridiculous. Additionally, the episode emphasizes the recurring problem of mistaken identity: Lime is not the man in the first grave, and Martins is not Benjamin Dexter. Neither man is fully successful in his deception.
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