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
Lucian Gregory and Gabriel Syme reach a dingy pub. As a joke, Syme asks the waiter for lobster and champagne—but the waiter actually brings it to him, and it’s delicious. Syme tells Gregory that he feels like he’s in a dream. In response, Gregory calls himself and his fellow anarchists “the most modest men that ever lived on earth.” Syme lights up a cigar, and then the table starts to rotate. Suddenly, it drops through the floor into the basement. Syme is unfazed.
Syme’s luxurious meal again shows that, in this novel, nothing is really what it seems. Whereas Gregory is a political radical who lives in luxury, the pub is a luxurious establishment masquerading as an ordinary, working-class one. Gregory clearly recognizes this when he calls anarchists “modest”—he’s pointing out that the pub’s outward appearance, like his own lifestyle, is really just a disguise. These disguises raise an important question, which recurs throughout the novel. Are anarchism, modernism, and their philosophical counterparts mass movements or elite ones? They certainly claim to be defending common people against elites, but whose interests do they really serve?
Themes
Gregory leads Syme down a corridor to a dimly-lit iron door. He knocks five times and identifies himself as “Mr. Joseph Chamberlain,” and the door opens. The men head down a series of other passageways, where the walls are lined with guns and other weapons. At last, they reach a strange, spherical steel room, which is filled with bombs and benches. They sit, and Gregory asks whether Syme still doubts his seriousness as an anarchist.
The underground bunker shows that Lucian Gregory really is serious about anarchism. But Joseph Chamberlain was a prominent British politician who switched sides from radical liberalism to radical conservatism during his career, so the anarchists’ passcode suggests that they may not really be as serious as they appear. Indeed, Gregory’s pride at showing Syme his bunker suggests that he might be more interested in attention and pride than genuine political change. So does his decision to tell Syme his secret—one that not even his own sister knows—in the first place.
Themes
Syme has two questions for Gregory. First, he asks, what do the anarchists want? “To abolish God!” Gregory replies fanatically—his group wants to destroy all of the “arbitrary distinctions” between right and wrong. Second, Syme asks why Gregory talks so openly about anarchism with his friends in Saffron Park, if his real operations are so top-secret. Gregory smiles and reveals that his friends don’t think he’s serious about anarchism, either. In the past, he tried disguising himself as a priest, a millionaire, and a soldier, but none of the disguises were convincing. So he visited the President of the Central Anarchist Council, who told him to disguise himself as an anarchist—because nobody thinks they actually pose any threat.
While Gregory’s political position may seem dangerously vague, it does reflect what real anarchists wanted to do in Chesterton’s era: destroy anything they could. Gregory points out the close link between nihilist philosophy (which opposes religion and rejects moral values as “arbitrary distinctions”) and anarchist politics (which tries to destroy all forms of power, which it views as illegitimate). Both are essentially based on the premise that, if order and structure are arbitrary, then it’s better to embrace chaos and meaninglessness. Finally, Gregory’s disguise once again points to the differences between how people appear and their true identities: he can only play his true self in public because everyone else assumes that he’s being inauthentic.
Themes
Gregory explains that the Central Anarchist Council’s seven members use the days of the week as pseudonyms. The leader is Sunday, and Thursday—the head of the London branch—has just died. In fact, the branch will elect Thursday’s successor tonight, and Gregory is certain that they’ll choose him. Once they do, Gregory explains with glee, he’ll take his official uniform—a sword, revolver, sandwich case, flask, and cloak—and go to the river, where a boat will whisk him away to glory.
Gregory’s explanation finally gives the reader a hint to the novel’s title: the rest of the story will somehow revolve around who becomes Thursday and what they do on the Central Anarchist Council. Yet Gregory’s excitement about winning the election and Thursday’s theatrical supervillain disguise once again suggest that anarchists are more interested in personal gain, glory, and pride than making a positive political change.
Themes
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Syme declares that he’s starting to like Gregory—but only “because [he’s] such an ass.” Noting that he’s promised not to tell Gregory’s secret to the police, Syme asks Gregory to promise not to tell his own secret to the other anarchists. Gregory agrees, and Syme reveals his secret: he’s a police detective working for Scotland Yard. And he can already hear the other anarchists walking down the corridor.
Chesterton adds in another plot twist based on mistaken identity—and readers should prepare for many more to come. Syme’s comment sounds like a joke, but it’s actually literal: Lucian Gregory is so foolish and self-absorbed that he accidentally helped the police infiltrate the Central Anarchist Council.
Themes
