De Selby has a host of critical analyzers – the narrator among them – many of whom have deeply conflicting opinions of his esoteric thoughts. Although generally held in high regard by these people (many of whom hate each other), he is thought by many to have had regrettable lapses and is even called, by implication, a "nincompoop". In The Third Policeman one of de Selby's biographers is quoted as saying "The beauty of reading a page of de Selby is that it leads one inescapably to the happy conviction that one is not, of all nincompoops, the greatest."