Third Man Themes of Empathy

Third Man

Themes of Empathy and Morality in the Third Man

In 1949, the film The Third Man established itself as an immediate classic, resonating with audiences who found consonance with its nourish conception of humanity in a shattered post-WWII society. The film was so popular in fact that a year later, its screenwriter Graeme Greene agreed to publish the novella which he had devised in the process of creating the film. (Wikipedia, 1) Its fortunate that he did because the text provides a great deal of insight into a set of characters with tremendous depth.

Indeed, there is a compelling self-consciousness to the narrative in the Third Man, with the officer who tells the novella's story displaying an empathy for Martins that compels the reader accordingly. This is a theme which is introduced early in the plot, upon Martins' arrival in Vienna. When Lime does not appear at the airport to greet him as promised, the narrator denotes of his disappointment, "we never get accustomed to being less important to other people then they are to us -- Martins felt the little jab of dispensability." (Greene, 18) This sensitivity is an important point to establish early in the text as the reader finds himself in a somewhat brutal circle of schemers. In this regard, Martins functions as a moral compass in the face of Anna's inconstant frailty and Lime's outright villainy, captured best in the hospital sequence late in the story.

Martins strikes the reader, then as a vulnerable figure not unlike ourselves perhaps. Indeed, the opening lines of the novella function to introduce us to the pithy narrator in the good-natured Major Calloway and simultaneously to the core features which he detects in our protagonist. Calloway observes of Martins, "In normal circumstances a cheerful fool. Drinks too much and may cause a little trouble. Whenever a woman passes raises his eyes and makes some comment, but I get the impression that really he'd rather not be bothered." (Greene, 13)

The description here immediately tells us several things about Martins, chief among them that he comports with a certain archetypal anti-hero that has great appeal to the common man. With its publication in 1950, the novella would become popular both in light of the film's success and, it should seem, in light of the impact of a hero with these relatable characteristics and yet the capacity to surprise the audience and his fellow characters with an impetuous determination to get to the bottom of an unfolding caper.

The other important plot insight offered by this description is Martins' vulnerability to women in particular, which with the introduction of the deceptive Anna to the narrative, would become a prime operant in his misjudgments and entanglements. The resolution which finds them somehow coming together suggests that this vulnerability is damning in Martins, who somehow finds a way to forgive the moral trespasses of this alluring woman even as he felt compelled to kill his own former mentor in Harry Lime.

The story complies with a strange set of moral prerogatives though, a point reinforced throughout and no doubt owing to the decayed and splintered post-war Vienna which it had made as its setting. As Greene writes, "if you are to understand this strange rather sad story you must have an impression at least of the background -- the smashed dreary city of Vienna divided up in zones among the four powers." (Greene, 14)