Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Man Who Was Thursday, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Order, Chaos, and God
Identity
Tradition vs. Modernity
The Purpose of Art
Summary
Analysis
Syme, Dr. Bull, and the Professor sit and share a bottle of wine at the café in Calais. Syme gets drunk and writes out a witty script for how he’d like his conversation with the Marquis to go. When the other men say that he’s being ridiculous, since the Marquis will never say the lines he’s planned, he jokingly replies that he’ll have to say them all himself. Syme stands and gazes at the Marquis, who looks barbaric but regal in his festive spring suit.
Syme’s drunkenness and taste for comedy suggest that he may not be taking his mission to stop the end of the world quite as seriously as he did at the beginning of the novel. The other detectives are right to question why he writes out a script for his conversation with the Marquis. But in the context of the novel, this script is very significant: Syme is writing fiction, an alternate but idealized version of reality. Of course, this speaks to Chesterton’s goals in writing this novel. When Syme approaches him, the Marquis now takes on all of the sinister, devilish traits that Syme once associated with the Professor and Dr. Bull.
Themes
Syme approaches the Marquis, tries to pull on his nose, and then starts insisting that the Marquis has insulted his aunt by making disparaging comments about the band. The Marquis’s companions call this absurd and point out that Syme is attacking the Marquis for no reason. But the Marquis proposes a duel, just like Syme hoped.
The novel descends deeper and deeper into absurdity: Syme’s attack on the Marquis is nonsensical on purpose, but it still achieves his intended goals. This suggests an explanation for Syme’s drunkenness and fiction-writing: he truly is proposing a duel about nothing, and he recognizes that he has entered an illogical, unpredictable universe where he will ultimately be at the mercy of greater, darker forces.
Themes
Syme walks back to his table, where he tells the Professor and Dr. Bull that they have to insist on scheduling the duel for the next morning, after the Marquis’s train leaves for Paris. Syme predicts that the Marquis will propose to duel in a field near a train station, hoping to win the duel quickly and catch the train. In fact, this is exactly what he proposes.
Syme’s wildly elaborate plot succeeds once again. Through the unusual juxtaposition of a traditional duel and a modern train, Chesterton mocks his own preoccupation with how people can preserve traditions in a modern world defined by accelerating economic and technological change. This scene also recalls Syme and Lucian Gregory’s argument at the very beginning of the novel, when Syme cited trains as a prime example of how poetry’s true purpose is to create order and progress.
Themes
In the morning, Syme meets the well-dressed Marquis for their duel in a lush, flowery meadow next to a train station. Colonel Ducroix, the Marquis’s representative, proposes that the duel should end after the first major injury. But, as Syme’s representative, Dr. Bull insists that the duel must continue until one of the men disables the other. The men take their swords, remove their coats, and start fighting. Syme remembers how he feared the Professor and Dr. Bull before realizing they were policemen—but this doesn’t compare to the fear of death he feels now. As he fights, he contemplates the beauty of nature.
Syme carries out his elaborate, unnecessarily dangerous plan to stop the Marquis’s attack. In fact, Syme even seems to enjoy putting his life at risk, which raises the question of whether his primary motivation is really just to stop the anarchists. Meanwhile, Syme’s meditation on nature is similar to his reflection on the crank-organ music during the Anarchist Council meeting in Leicester Square: it reminds him that there is something worth fighting for in the world (namely, beauty).
Themes
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The Marquis glances over at the railway line, then starts fighting with renewed fury. Syme knows that the train must be coming. The Marquis overexerts himself, and Syme parries his sword and nicks him, but the Marquis doesn’t seem affected at all. A minute later, he stabs the Marquis in the neck and again in the cheek—but there’s no blood or scar. Syme starts to worry that the Marquis has some devilish supernatural power, and he starts contemplating humanity’s poetic beauty again. He hears the train approaching and stopping in the station.
Just like when Gogol clearly didn’t fit into the Anarchist Council and when the Professor inexplicably kept up with Syme during their chase around London, when the Marquis gets stabbed and turns out completely fine, this strongly hints that he’s hiding something. At this point in the novel, it would scarcely be surprising if he weren’t really who he claims to be. As the duel nears its end, Chesterton emphasizes the contrast between the approaching train and Syme’s poetic flight of fancy. This is a metaphor for the tension at the heart of this book between tradition, beauty, and art, on the one hand, and science, modernity, and violence, on the other.
Themes
The Marquis suddenly drops his sword and asks Syme to just pull his nose, like he originally wanted, and end the duel. Dr. Bull and Ducroix agree that this is improper, but for some incomprehensible reason, Syme does it. The Marquis’s nose breaks off—it’s made of paper. Next, the Marquis tears off his own left eyebrow and hands it to Ducroix, who is horrified to realize that he was supporting a cheater who wore padding to a duel.
Chesterton layers absurdity upon absurdity and misconception upon misconception: at first, Syme viewed the nose-pulling as a way to get his duel, but now, it turns out that the duel was all a roundabout way for the Marquis to avoid nose-pulling. The Marquis’s mask explains why Syme’s sword never injured him. The paper mask also represents the novel’s obsession with deception and disguise even more literally than the other disguises Syme has encountered so far. Finally, the Colonel Ducroix’s reaction is a reminder that traditional concepts of morality and honor are central to duels (and the whole world of aristocratic politics that they represent).
Themes
The Marquis insists that he must make his train, but Dr. Bull and Syme declare that he won’t be taking it. The Professor announces that the Marquis will set off a bomb if he boards the train. But the Marquis insists that he could catch any train to Paris, and he needed that specific train in order to catch him. Nobody understands, so he clarifies: if he misses the train, then Sunday wins. He tears off the rest of his disguise and reveals that he's actually a policeman named Inspector Ratcliffe. Dr. Bull explains the situation to the Marquis’s henchmen, and Ducroix concludes that they must join the fight against anarchy.
The pattern of mistaken identity repeats itself once again. The Marquis wasn’t taking the train to set off the bomb: he was taking it to stop Sunday from setting off the bomb. So once again, because of mistaken identity, Syme and his allies were actually doing evil when they thought they were doing good. Ducroix’s reaction shows that ordinary, honorable people recognize the threat of anarchy, too. While Ducroix is a minor character in the novel as a whole, his steadfast morality makes him an important counterweight to the nihilism and indifference of the book’s anarchist characters.
Themes
Syme is baffled to learn that nearly all the councilmen were police. But the Marquis thinks that Sunday chose them on purpose, to keep them busy fighting each other. The Marquis also thinks that Sunday is coming their way, in the crowd that just disembarked from the train. Worse still, the policemen are all isolated in a remote meadow, so Sunday and Monday can easily get rid of them. Dr. Bull and Syme look at the crowd through a pair of binoculars—they notice that a few men are wearing black disguises, and one only has half a smile.
The more Syme learns, the less he understands. The truth is far more mysterious and incomprehensible than the convenient story that he told himself at the beginning of the novel—that the other men were evil anarchists who must be stopped. But, once again, Syme and his allies don’t have the time to work out what is really happening, because there’s an imminent threat on the horizon. Since Chesterton continually associates darkness with evil, the black disguises identify the men as anarchists. But since disguises are often deceptive in this novel, readers can never know for sure.
Themes
