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
Ducroix forgives the five detectives for dragging him into a pointless battle and takes them to board their boat back to England. On their way, they try to figure out what “Sunday’s little game” was really about. Fortunately, their next council meeting is tomorrow. After a pleasant journey, they spend the night near Leicester Square. On his evening walk, Dr. Bull runs into Gogol. The group explains that they’re all police spies, and they have a drink.
The mystery of the anarchist conspiracy is more confusing than ever, but oddly enough, it also seems less sinister than ever. Like the other conflicts in the last six chapters, the conflict between the detectives and the Secretary’s army resolves with no clear winner and loser, because everyone realizes that they were on the same side all along. The detectives now know that they don’t actually have to save the world from a shady conspiracy—instead, they just have to figure out how they got duped for so long into believing in such a conspiracy.
Themes
In the morning, the six policemen meet Sunday on the same balcony overlooking Leicester Square. Sunday greets them jovially and asks if they killed the Czar. The Secretary demands to know who Sunday is and what they have all been doing. Sunday declares that the others “are a set of highly well-intentioned young jackasses,” and that they will never know who he is, even if they learn everything else in the universe. He climbs over the balcony railing, dangles off of it, and reveals: “I’m the man in the dark room, who made you all policemen.”
The detectives return to the scene of the crime, the balcony in Leicester Square where they originally planned the bombing. Last time they were here, all six of them sincerely believed that they were both joining and sabotaging an anarchist conspiracy—which turned out never to have existed. When they confront Sunday, he doesn’t give them any clear answers about the true meaning of their quest, but he does reveal that he is also the police chief. Readers may have been able to predict this from the striking similarity in the way Syme described the police chief and Sunday. But this information is likely to only baffle the reader further: what is Sunday’s real agenda?
Themes
The President drops down off the balcony into the square, runs off, and gets in a horse-drawn cab. The six detectives speed off after him in three other cabs. When Syme assembles a crowd by yelling “Stop thief!,” the President’s cabman slows down to avoid drawing attention. So the President takes the whip himself and starts lashing the horse to go faster. When he's right ahead of Syme’s cab, he turns around and throws a wad of paper at Syme. It’s two nonsense letters, one for Dr. Bull and one for Syme.
The novel’s third and final chase scene begins—but Syme and the other detectives don’t even fully understand what they’re chasing. Sunday seems to have supernatural strength, speed, and agility, especially for such a giant, fat man. Again, this shows that he’s no ordinary man—there’s far more to him than meets the eye. His letters are also utterly incomprehensible: they add to the mystery at the heart of the novel, but not to the detectives’ (or the reader’s) hopes of ever resolving it.
Themes
When the traffic stops to wait for a firetruck to pass, the President runs out of his cab and jumps onto the firetruck. The detectives’ cabs speed after it, and the President tosses another note back to them—this time it’s for Ratcliffe, mocking his “trouser-stretchers.” When the firetruck passes a series of high railings, the President jumps off the firetruck and over one of them. Syme follows. Behind the railing is an ordinary house, which Syme thinks might be the President’s. There are “devilish” roaring and screaming noises coming from it. The other detectives follow Syme over the fence and onto a footpath.
The chase grows more absurd and incomprehensible, but it’s also the protagonists’ only shot at understanding the true meaning of their own detective work. It’s notable that, in the last two chase scenes—the Professor chasing Syme and the Secretary’s mob chasing the detectives—the protagonists were being pursued. Only now have they become the pursuers. Indeed, so far in the novel, they have had at least a vague sense of purpose: to stop the anarchist conspiracy, and to avoid dying in the process. They have not needed to chase another goal. But now, they’ve learned that the conspiracy doesn’t even exist, and the sinister menace that was chasing them was a product of their own imaginations all along.
Themes
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Soon, Dr. Bull realizes that they’re at the zoo. A zookeeper passes by and asks if they’ve found the mad elephant who ran away with a large, elegantly-dressed old gentleman—the President. Soon enough, the President passes right in front of them, riding the elephant through a mass of people and out the zoo gate. The detectives follow, and Syme contemplates the absurdity of nature’s animals on the way. When the men are in cabs, the President throws Gogol a wad of paper—it consists of 33 blank sheets and one which says: “The word, I fancy, should be ‘pink.’”
With the zoo and the elephant, the novel veers even further into absurdity. With his Godlike power over the world and its creatures, Sunday seems to be daring the detectives—and Chesterton the reader—to guess what’s really going on, and what any of his clues really mean. It’s also telling that, in past moments of poetic inspiration, Syme has contemplated the beauty of nature and its animals, but now, all he can think about is how strange they are. Without his anti-anarchist crusade to give him meaning and direction, he starts losing his sense that there are wonderful things worth fighting for in the world.
Themes
The detectives chase the President’s elephant through central London for a long time, until they finally lose him. A few minutes later, they encounter the elephant alone, without the President. A random official hands the Secretary a note from the President: it’s a short rhyming poem about death, herrings, and flying. Then, the detectives see a hot air balloon taking off with the President inside. He throws down one last note, this time for the Professor, commenting on his beauty. The detectives chase after the balloon.
The President continues to outsmart the detectives. All the while, he finds the time to write them clever, confusing notes. Of course, these notes are Chesterton’s way of mocking the clues and false leads that he has shown Syme and the other detectives follow, fruitlessly, throughout the novel. But at last, one of Sunday’s notes seems to make sense: his poem to the Secretary points out that the other notes have been red herrings (misleading clues), foreshadows himself flying away, and predicts the death scene that will come in the next chapter.
Themes
