Chapter Commentary of The Third Man - Study Guide by Graham Greene

a girl'. Martins, it is clear, has not been in love. If he loved Harry, it was the schoolboy Harry, not the real Harry.

They arrive at the Lime's flat to find a crowd gathered. They enquire and find that the porter is dead. A little boy, Hansl, gives impromptu and informal evidence - he heard the porter having a row with a foreigner. When Martins leaves the scene, Hansl and his father follow. Martins leaves Anna in a cinema and returns to his hotel, with the purpose of contacting Calloway. He is trying to do so when he whisked away to the 'Cultural centre'. The time has come for Martins, the writer, to give his lecture on the modern novel. It is, of course, an amusing scene. High comedy ('James Joyce - I've never heard of him... He wrote Ulysses... I don't read Greek... ') is laced, however, with a more serious matter, the matter of the Third Man: Popescu is at the meeting and asks whether Martins is engaged on any story. Martins replies that he is writing a story called 'The Third Man', a murder story, based on fact. Popescu advises him to stick to fiction. Martins replies that he has gone too far to turn back. Popescu leaves and sets a trap for Martins. Martins, seeing Popescu and his thugs waiting outside, finds an alternative exit and evades his pursuers as he runs to Calloway's office.

Calloway has had enough:

'I told you to go away, Martins. This isn't Santa Fe, I'm not a sheriff and you aren't a cowboy.'[81]

He tells Martins about Lime's racket. Joseph Harbin was a medical orderly at the military hospital. Lime and his associates bought penicillin that Harbin stole from supplies. Penicillin was in very short demand and Lime sold diluted batches to the civilian hospitals. The outcome was grave: gangrene, lost limbs were a common result of insufficient penicillin injections. Death was not uncommon either. The doctors were not guilty - they did not know that the penicillin they prescribed had been diluted by Lime. The most disturbing result of Lime's racket was to be found on the children's ward. Meningitis was rife: the lucky children died; the unlucky ones went mad.

Calloway goes on to present the evidence that these awful scenes were the result of Lime's racket. The evidence is convincing. The best description of Martins' reaction is in the book:

'If one watched a world come to an end, a plane dive from its course, I don't suppose one would chatter, and a world for Martins had certainly come to an end, a world of friendship, hero-worship, confidence that had begun twenty years before - in a school corridor. Every memory - afternoons in the long grass, the illegitimate shoots on Brickworth Common, the dreams, the walks, every shared experience as simultaneously tainted, like the soil of an atomised town.' (89)

So, the Western ends - inconclusively. Reality is not as simple as the good guy - bad guy world of cheap novelettes. Martins decides to leave Vienna.

Life is never so simple. Certainly, life is never so simple for a man such as Martins in a situation such as Martins'. He tries to break his crushing fall into the world of reality with drink. Drunk he goes in search of Anna. She, too, has learnt from Calloway about Harry. Her reaction is somewhat different. She doesn't have to face a reality that has been hiding for twenty years:

'For twenty years I knew him - the drinks he liked, the girls he liked. We laughed at the same things. He couldn't bear the colour greens. But it wasn't true. He never existed, we dreamed him.'

Anna tries to console him:

'There are so many things you don't know about a person you love, good things, bad things.'

But Martins never really loved Harry. He loved the image of 'Harry the hero' that he dreamed up for himself. Anna reprimands him with this: