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

'For heaven's sake, stop making him in your image. Harry was real. He wasn't just your friend and my lover. He was Harry.'[94]

Martins is confused. His reality, he realises, was fantasy - just as his idea of love was fantasy. In the book, he tells Calloway how Anna has disabused him of his mistaken notion of love:

'As I stood up I looked down at her face. It wasn't a beautiful face - that was the trouble. It was a face to live with, day in, day out. A face for wear. I felt as though I'd come into a new country where I couldn't speak the language. I had always thought it was beauty one loved in a woman.' (64)

This truth, a truth about himself more than anything else, emerges now - in vino veritas - and he tells her:

'Don't talk wisdom at me. You make it sound as if [Harry's] manners were occasionally bad... I don't know... I'm just a bad writer who falls in love with girls... you.'

He has come to terms with the truth about himself - no longer a lone rider, just a bad writer - and about love, but he is still confused about Harry. Anna is right: he is still Harry. As Calloway says early on in the book, his image of Harry and Martins' image of Harry are two perspectives - admittedly very different - on the same man. Martins has been forced to walk around this 'Harry' to look at him from a different angle. He looks very different - Martins now sees the dark side of Harry - but Anna is right, he is still Harry. Martins is confused. He even goes so far as saying that whoever killed Harry did him justice and that he might have done the same thing himself. Anna replies, reiterating her point:>

'A man doesn't alter just because you find out more.'

Martins makes Anna laugh. Martins, desperately in love with her, sees it perhaps as a sign that she could love him. He asks her to laugh again but she loves Harry, 'There isn't enough for to laughs'. Previously, Martins describes Harry as someone who just made everything so fun [59]. His attempts to do so fall a long way short:

'I'd make comic faces all day long. I'd stand on my head and grin at you between my legs. I'd learn a lot of jokes from the books on After Dinner Speaking... I'd…You still love Harry, don't you?'

The film is a good deal more ambiguous at this point. In the book, Anna replies 'Yes' as we would expect, to which Martins rejoins, 'Perhaps I do. I don't know' (96). In the film, she doesn't reply so directly, 'I've got to learn my lines' and he leaves with the hopeless line, 'You told me to find a girl'. This is something of an improvement upon the original. Their emotions might not have changed in the transfer from book to film but the suspense is kept up, keeps us guessing...

Up until this point, the assumption is that Harry has been killed. We saw the frozen bricks of earth shovelled onto his coffin. It comes as something of a surprise, to say the least, when Martins sees Harry. He leaves Anna's flat and is aware of a man standing in the shadows of a doorway across the street. A passing car disperses the shadows which conceal the man and reveal Harry. Martins gives chase but Harry disappears.

Calloway does not believe the story. Martins was, after all, very drunk at the time. Martins barely believes it himself. He refers to the figure not as Harry but as 'it', 'a ghost'. But despite his realistic appreciation of his drunken fallibility, he is driven by a faith. He takes Calloway to the scene of the chase:

'And it vanished with a puff of smoke, I suppose, and a clap of ... It wasn't the German gin, Paine.' [96]

There is an iron kiosk in the middle of the square. Innocent though it looks - Martins hadn't given it a second look when chasing Harry - it conceals a door. Inside is a staircase leading down to the sewers. Martins hasn't seen a ghost. Harry Lime is alive. Who, then, was buried? They dig up the grave and