50 pages • 1 hour read
The Third Man
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Themes
Deception and Corruption
Graham Greene’s Vienna exists in the shadow of war. Even the setting is gray and depressing. Lime’s supposed burial at the first funeral occurs on a frozen day, so cold that even digging a grave is difficult, and Calloway calls it a “smashed dreary city” (2). The characters’ relative cynicism matches the city’s gloom. None of Lime’s Vienna friends share Martins’s alarm that Lime may have been involved in corrupt activity. Kurtz tells Martins that in everyone in Vienna is involved in crime due to the nature of the occupation, and Anna Schmidt similarly declares that “everyone’s in a racket” (24), though she eventually takes more of an interest in what Martins finds out. For Anna, deception is a survival mechanism, as she lives in Vienna under false papers, fearing deportation to Hungary for her family’s Nazi ties. Unlike the other characters, she’s remarkably forthright and consistent in her views: Her love for Lime never waivers, even when she finds out the depths of his deception. Perhaps significantly, no one in the story regards her as a particularly skillful actress: Like her identity documents, her performance skills are unconvincing.
Though he’s the story’s narrator, Calloway is in no way its hero. From the first, Calloway conceals information from Martins, not admitting that he’s a police officer and lying about needing a ride back to the city so that he can ply Martins with drinks. Calloway discloses only later that he’s having Martins followed to learn about the course of his amateur rival’s investigation into Lime’s death.
Lime, of course, is the ultimate deceptive character, faking his own death to avoid arrest for his illegal and highly immoral criminal activities. Lime effectively lures Martins to Vienna, taking advantage of his friend’s naiveté and relative poverty to bring him on as a partner. However, Martins is not entirely innocent himself. He’s happy to take advantage of Crabbin’s assumption that he’s the more famous Benjamin Dexter, as he was “prepared to agree to anything to get rid of Mr. Crabbin and also to secure a week’s free board and lodging” (14). Martins is later so preoccupied with his hunt for the third man that he deceives Crabbin’s audience without much guilt and signs all their books as B. Dexter. Although Martins, as a writer of Western novels, defends stories in which a lone gunman can topple a corrupt sheriff, he largely operates in a world without heroes. As the story closes, the truth emerges, and the long winter may be nearing an end. However, these signs bring Martins no comfort.
The Loss of Innocence
At Lime’s first funeral, Calloway notes Martins’s youthful emotions, observing that “the tears of a boy ran down his thirty-five-year-old cheeks. Rollo Martins believed in friendship, and that was why what happened later was a worse shock to him than it would have been to you or me” (2). Immediately, Martins occupies his own emotional universe, separate from the cynicism of Calloway, a cynicism that the reader is invited into with the words “you or me.” While Lime is a Catholic, he’s an idol to Martins, an idol he worships into adulthood. Martins clings to the idea of Lime’s relative innocence as long as possible, accepting the truth only when Calloway shows him photographs of the poisoned children. Though he’s not especially saintly, Martins wants to believe in a world that clearly defines good and evil, a world in which his boyhood loyalty can survive the compromises of Vienna’s postwar landscape.
Significantly, Martins first begins to accept Lime’s death when Herr Koch compares him to a rabbit for how easily he was struck down. This recalls a childhood incident in which Lime encouraged Martins to shoot an animal but Martins was inept and only wounded it (6). Martins’s childlike sentiments persist at the wrong moment, as he doesn’t sound the alert when Lime escapes back into the sewers. Calloway explains this in emotional terms, declaring that “it was not, I suppose, Lime the penicillin racketeer who was escaping down the street; it was Harry” (75). Martins’s sentimentality causes him great pain in the end, however, when he wounds Lime too badly for him to escape and ultimately kills him as an act of mercy. He repeats his childhood mistakes on multiple levels: poor marksmanship and persistent trust in Lime. Another result of his sentimentality is the death of the innocent Herr Koch and, in effect, the death of Martins’s idyllic view of his own youth, marked by the constancy of Lime’s friendship.
Martins himself alludes to this disillusionment when Calloway attempts to console him with the reminder, “You win, you’ve proved me a bloody fool” and he replies, “I haven’t won. I’ve lost” (79). Though Calloway previously joked about Martins’s advantages as an amateur—his ability to exaggerate and work odd hours—he also has no professional detachment to fall back on. He has only grief for his friend and for his lost ideals.
The Value of Morality
Although Graham Greene structured the story like a mystery—initially, the concern is who killed Lime and why—the tale is also one of moral dilemmas and conflicting views of what is right. Calloway, for all his cynicism, sincerely wishes to end Lime’s penicillin business, even though he exploits Martins to do it. Martins, for his part, seems most comfortable in the detective story, although in the end he’s dogged by moral questions.
Most of Lime’s associates share his cynicism, though the first clue to the story’s moral preoccupation is the fastidious and taciturn Dr. Winkler. His home is full of religious artifacts, and Martins specifically notes one crucifix where Christ holds his arms upright. Winkler explains that the artifact belongs to the Catholic sect known as the Jansenists, and that the depiction is “because he died, in their view, only for the elect” (28). The Jansenists sympathized with the Calvinist idea that who went to Heaven or faced damnation in Hell was pre-ordained, known only to God. This ties into the Protestant belief that faith alone, rather than the Catholic emphasis on both faith and good works, helped assure salvation.
Winkler’s crucifix indirectly introduces the idea that actions may be irrelevant to salvation or damnation. Anna apparently shares this view, arguing that Lime is “the same man” (57-58) she always loved and that Martins’s revelations about him don’t alter her love or fundamentally change his nature. Harry Lime himself elaborates on this in his speech to Martins on the Prater Ferris Wheel, when he compares all the people below them to insignificant “dots” (70), implying that individual deaths or suffering are acceptable casualties in his work. Martins rejects both of their views in the end, defending traditional ideas of good and evil despite the war’s lasting changes to the world.
Defending his insistence that profit is his only animating principle, Lime argues that his business practices don’t harm anyone’s eternal soul. Nevertheless, he declares that he still adheres to Catholic theology: “Oh, I still believe, old man. In God and Mercy and all that” (71). Significantly, Lime himself doesn’t show mercy to anyone, though he does sentimentally refuse any opportunity to kill Martins. Instead, it is Martins who must show his friend mercy, killing him to end his physical pain from his wounds.
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