Identities - Flann O'Brien
Flann O’Brien was the identity O’Nolan adopted for his novels and a few of his journalistic screeds. Timothy O’Keeffe, a close friend of O’Nolan’s suggests that the identity may have stemmed from Brian O Lynn (60). In Irish, Brian O Lynn becomes Brian O Fhloinn, which once taken backwards and changing the nominative O Floinn, into a personal name, Flann, O’Nolan created Flann O’Brien (O’Keeffe 60). Under the pen name O’Brien, O’Nolan wrote At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, and An Beal Bocht. Flann O’Brien became O’Nolan’s most popular identity for his non-journalistic pursuits. What is common amongst O’Brien’s work is an effort to subvert the traditional narrative structure. This is seen at once in At Swim-Two-Birds with the narrator’s claim that every novel need not have only one beginning, setting up At Swim’s three opening structure. The Third Policeman similarly uses non-traditional narrative devices as is seen through the frequent shifts in the narrator. Within this book the reader will find that
 
“[t]he narrator who speaks in Chapter VI and X does not speak with his own voice, but again in the voice of another, be it Sergeant Pluck or another unnamed. And Sergeant Pluck himself, in Chapter VI, merely takes over the manner of Martin Finnucane, which In its turn is only a special instance of the De Selbean rhetoric at a lower level of control” (Mays 91).
  
Within the character of Flann O’Brien, we find the unrestrained imaginitive powers of O’Nolan. The frequent use of modernist techniques which O’Nolan employs to undercut the traditional reflect the same ideas found in O’Nolan’s other, journalistic identities: a conscious effort toward literary iconoclasm. The subversiveness found in The O’Blather’s magazine dedicated to clay-pigeon shooting, or in Myles na Gopaleen’s insistence on the shrew as the fiercest of all creatures, or in Brother Barnabas’s generous offer of five schillings for a story relating a farmer’s dismemberment, show the same desire to shatter the literary norms, only they make use of a different medium.