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
Thanks to their horses, Syme and his companions finally outrun the anarchists. They reach the town of Lancy at sunset and seek out Dr. Renard, the only honest rich man in town, who is Colonel Ducroix’s friend and owns a car. But Dr. Bull objects that the anarchists might catch them if they stop. Then, the men hear the thunder of hooves behind them, and they realize that the anarchists have taken the rest of the innkeeper’s horses. The men rush to Dr. Renard’s hilltop house. At first, Dr. Renard doesn’t believe that anarchists are really coming after them, but then he sees the black army charging up the hill. One horseman rides far ahead of the rest: the Secretary.
The chase continues. At the beginning of this scene, the forces of good are clearly outrunning the forces of evil because noble people like the peasant, the innkeeper, and Dr. Renard recognize their goodness and help them out. The world seems to be in order. But then, the anarchists start to catch up and the situation starts to change. Chesterton deliberately undermines the appealing idea that good is handily defeating evil. It’s telling that this army is led by the Secretary, the first of the anarchists Syme met at the beginning of the novel. His fight with the forces of darkness appears to have come full circle.
Themes
Dr. Renard barely drives his cars, so by the time the men get one of them up and running, night has already fallen. As Syme tries to start it, the Secretary catches up to the group and stations his horse right in front of the car. Suddenly, the car lurches forward, knocks the Secretary off his horse, and runs him over. The men drive off into the night. To light their way, Colonel Ducroix holds up an antique lantern with a cross on it (which Dr. Renard yanked out of his ceiling as a personal favor). On their way towards the police station, Ratcliffe and Dr. Bull disagree about which side the town would support in a fight.
In this novel, modern technology usually represents moral ambiguity and godless depravity, so the fact that Dr. Renard seldom uses his cars suggests that he truly is an ethical man. Yet, when the car runs over the horse, the detectives seem to be on the wrong side of the clash between tradition and modernity. Unlike the car, Renard’s lantern clearly represents tradition and Christianity. In fact, it’s a metaphor for the divine light, or God’s presence and guidance in everyday life.
Themes
The Professor hears the sound of Dr. Renard’s other two cars, which are speeding at them, full of anarchists. A bullet whizzes by the men as they debate whether they will survive and whether the townspeople are secretly working with the anarchists. Ratcliffe points out that a mob has blocked the road ahead. The men stop the car to reevaluate their plans, until Dr. Bull realizes that Dr. Renard himself is leading the crowd. Dr. Bull runs over to thank Dr. Renard—who starts shooting at him. Dr. Bull returns to the car and admits that he has no idea what’s happening. He doesn’t think Dr. Renard could possibly be working for the anarchists. Colonel Ducroix expresses his astonishment and approaches Dr. Renard to investigate. Dr. Renard raises his pistol, but does not shoot.
The anarchist army didn’t just take Renard’s cars from him: they convinced him to join them. Dr. Bull thinks that Renard is deliberately leading the crowd astray, but he turns out to be too optimistic. So once again, the world turns on its head in a split second: suddenly, nothing means what it used to anymore. After all, throughout this chapter, the detectives constantly debate whether the townspeople are truly democrats or anarchists. This debate is a metaphor for the novel’s deeper questions about human nature: are people inherently good or evil? At this point in the chase scene, at which even upstanding citizens like Dr. Renard are joining the anarchists, it appears that the answer is that people are evil. But only time will tell if this is Chesterton’s actual belief, or just another twisted case of mistaken identity.
Themes
Syme wants to ram the car into the crowd, Dr. Bull wants to wait, and the Professor wants to go back. But the rest of the army is fast catching up on horseback—led by the innkeeper. So Syme veers the car down a steep road toward the sea—and crashes into a lamppost. The men crawl out of the car, grab swords, and jump down onto the beach. Syme leads them down a jetty, where they will try to defend their position until the police arrive.
Syme, Bull, and the Professor represent three different ways that the forces of good can fight the forces of evil: confrontation, retreat, or reappraisal. Of course, readers must consider these options in the context of the novel so far, which has consistently shown that people aren’t always really on the side of this battle that they think they are. Indeed, when the innkeeper joins the army, readers must choose between two explanations: either the innkeeper wasn’t really as honorable and traditional as he seemed, or else he actually thinks the anarchist army is in the right. Finally, the car striking the lamppost is a significant metaphor: modern technology crashes into and disables itself. Of course, this expresses Chesterton’s skepticism about this technology, which he thought didn’t solve all the problems it claimed to.
Themes
Get the entire The Man Who Was Thursday LitChart as a printable PDF.
When they turn around, the men see “a dark and roaring stream of humanity” following them onto the beach. Even the peasant who carted them to the inn is in the crowd. “We are the last of humankind,” laments Ratcliffe. The Professor quotes a verse about the end of the world from Alexander Pope’s Dunciad. The men see policemen rushing out of the station, joining the crowd, and preparing to shoot at them. Ratcliffe predicts that they will all die soon, but says that he has one last hope: “the man in the dark room.”
The detectives feel like “the last of humankind” because, with the “dark and roaring” anarchist army approaching them, it seems like humanity itself has gone over to the dark side—and the detectives are the last remaining defenders of morality and the common good. Ratcliffe’s comment about the police chief (who, ironically for the leader of the forces of good, met them in a “dark room”) reminds the reader that, even though the forces of evil seem incomprehensibly powerful, the forces of good also have an unfathomably powerful ally on their side. Needless to say, the police chief is a character foil for Sunday, and in the following chapters, the reader will see this comparison go even deeper.
Themes
Literary Devices
Then, the men realize that even Colonel Ducroix has joined the crowd. He is standing at the shore with the masked Secretary. When Syme starts walking toward him, he starts shooting and shatters Syme’s sword. Syme approaches him and knocks him down, then holds up Dr. Renard’s lantern, which he says represents the beauty of tradition and society. Anarchists can never create something so glorious, Syme declares—only destroy it. He hits the Secretary in the face with the lantern, then throws it into the ocean. The Secretary stands, removes his mask, and declares, “I arrest you in the name of the law.” He pulls out a blue card and explains that he’s a detective working for Scotland Yard. Dr. Bull explains that he and his companions are detectives, too.
The pattern continues: anarchists are really detectives, and both sides in the conflict view themselves as the protagonists in the battle of good against evil. The supposed horde of evil anarchists turns out to actually be a citizens’ army seeking to uphold honor, morality, and justice. So yet again, the novel shows that appearances are deceiving, and people are really more benevolent than they seem. It’s especially significant that Syme ends the war using Dr. Renard’s antique lantern—a piece of art covered in Christian symbolism. Clearly, this represents Chesterton’s belief that following Christian traditions is the key to upholding morality and saving society from evils like modernism, nihilism, capitalism, and anarchism.
Themes
Literary Devices
