The tension between reality and imagination is a central conflict in “The Third Level.” This tension is most clearly embodied by Sam, who is Charley’s psychiatrist. When Charley discovers Grand Central Station’s third level, which is set in 1894 and could potentially send Charley back in time permanently, Sam disregards his experience as a waking dream. Sam works with the human mind, and his profession as a psychiatrist causes him to chalk Charley’s experience up to a mental defect rather than a genuine and transcendental experience. In this way, he represents the pragmatic realist of the modern era, in contrast to the more idealist dreamer that Charley represents in his pursuit of the elusive third level.
However, the story’s presentation of what’s real and what’s not becomes clear at the end, when Sam himself disappears into 1894. While Charley is unable to find the third level after his initial discovery of it, Sam apparently searches for it, finds it, and embraces it. At the end of the story, Charley discovers Sam’s fate through a letter in his grandfather’s stamp collection: Sam has returned to 1894 and is quite happy there, having become a shopkeeper, since psychiatry is not a profession in the 19th century. By having the story’s most pragmatic character be the one to escape into the past, then, Finney invites readers to challenge the modern impulse to disregard anything that doesn’t seem realistic, plausible, or sensible—after all, if Sam can embrace time travel, then seemingly anyone should be able to accept the wondrous and unusual in life.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Reality vs. Imagination ThemeTracker
Reality vs. Imagination Quotes in The Third Level
I told him about the third level at Grand Central Station, and he said it was a waking-dream wish fulfillment. He said I was unhappy. That made my wife kind of mad, but he explained that he meant the modern world is full of insecurity, fear, war, worry and all the rest of it, and that I just want to escape. Well, hell, who doesn’t? Everyone I know wants to escape, but they don’t wander down into any third level at Grand Central Station.
My stamp collecting, for example; that’s a “temporary refuge from reality.” Well, maybe, but my grandfather didn’t need any refuge from reality; things were pretty nice and peaceful in his day, from all I hear, and he started my collection.
Sometimes I think Grand Central is growing like a tree, pushing out new corridors and staircases like roots. There’s probably a long tunnel that nobody knows about feeling its way under the city right now, on its way to Time Square, and maybe another to Central Park. And maybe—because for so many people through the years Grand Central has been an exit, a way of escape—maybe that’s how the tunnel I got into…
Have you ever been there? It’s a wonderful town still, with big old frame houses, huge lawns and tremendous trees whose branches meet overhead and roof the streets. And in 1894, summer evenings were twice as long, and people sat out on their lawns, the men smoking cigars and talking quietly, the women waving palm-leaf fans, with the fireflies all around, in a peaceful world. To be back there with the First World War still twenty years off, and World War II over forty years in the future … I wanted two tickets for that.
Charley, it’s true; I found the third level! I’ve been here two weeks, and right now, down the street at the Daly’s, someone is playing a piano, and they’re all out on the front porch singing, “Seeing Nellie home.” And I’m invited over for lemonade. Come on back, Charley and Louisa. Keep looking till you find the third level! It’s worth it, believe me!
I found out that Sam bought eight hundred dollars’ worth of old-style currency. That ought to set him up in a nice little hay, feed, and grain business; he always said that’s what he really wished he could do, and he certainly can’t go back to his old business. Not in Galesburg, Illinois, in 1894. His old business? Why, Sam was my psychiatrist.
Now, I don’t know why this should have happened to me. I’m just an ordinary guy named Charley, thirty-one years old, and I was wearing a tan gabardine suit and a straw hat with a fancy band; I passed a dozen men who looked just like me. And I wasn’t trying to escape from anything; I just wanted to get home to Louisa, my wife.
