goal: getting a P.R. “I think goals should never be easy, they should force you to work, even if they are uncomfortable at the time,” Michael Phelps, an Olympic gold medalist, once stated. This is the life of a swimmer. We train hard to swim hard, and we swim hard for ourselves and ourselves alone. We push past our own limits to reach out to our dreams, and then we push harder to grasp them. Essentially every swimmer’s goal upon entering a race is to get a P.R., or a personal record. However
Flann O'Brien, Dickens and Joyce: Form, Identity and Colonial Influences All quotations from The Third Policeman are taken from the 1993 Flamingo Modern Classic edition. In this essay I intend to examine Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman in the context of the time of its writing, 1940, its relation to certain English novelistic traditions and also the broader Irish literary tradition in which it belongs. Seamus Deane refers to Ireland as a "Strange Country" and indeed O'Brien's own narrator