With Flann O'Brien widely acknowledged as a subversive genius of early postmodernism, Flore Coulouma places the ``question of language'' at the center of his literary identity. Connecting O'Brien's philosophy of language to the convoluted structure of his writing, Coulouma demonstrates how bilingualism and an ambiguous relation to language inspired O'Brien's satirical fiction, while developing narrative oppositions such as orality and literacy, truth and fiction authority and legitimacy, and native and national language(s). Using oppositions to stage O'Brien's literary representation of the relationship of speakers to their native tongue, this book casts light on his intuitions about the failures and achievements of language, the logic of fiction, the relation between language and knowledge, and the impossibility of a nation cut off from its original tongue finding its linguistic identity.