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
In the pub, the Professor de Worms sits down right across from Gabriel Syme. Syme downs his beer and wonders what the Professor de Worms could possibly be doing. He wonders if it may be some kind of innocuous welcome ritual. But then, the Professor looks straight at him and asks, “Are you a policeman?” Syme is taken aback, but the Professor says that he looks like a policeman. Syme asks why and jokes that perhaps the Professor means it metaphorically, but the Professor asks again and again: “Are you a detective?” Syme says no. At the Professor’s request, Syme even swears on his own grave that he’s not a policeman.
At last, the Professor actually speaks directly to Syme. But the Professor’s question appears to confirm Syme’s worst fears: the other anarchists, it seems, already know that Syme is a spy. And if this is true, since Syme still can’t explain how the Professor managed to follow him all around the city, he must simply admit that the anarchists outsmarted him. Fortunately, as readers will soon learn, it isn’t true—Chesterton is just throwing even more plot twists at them.
Themes
“That’s a pity,” replies the Professor, “because I am.” He jokes that he should arrest Syme, then pulls out a blue police card. Syme feels like the world is upside down—but then realizes that this is a good thing, because it means that the anarchists probably aren’t onto him. He breaks out into laughter and pulls out his own blue card, but the Professor warns him to keep a low profile. The Professor jovially knocks his milk off the table, then reveals that he’s really 38 years old and in disguise. The Professor explains that he didn’t know that Gogol was on their side, and he was just as frightened as Syme when Sunday confronted them.
The deception and mistaken identity continue—as with Syme and Gogol, a character who seemed like a sinister villain turns out to actually be another hero. Thus, there is more good in the world than Syme thought: he was wrong about the Professor, but his error also means that he no longer has to work alone. Of course, the Professor’s disguise explains how he managed to follow Syme around London. But it also forces the reader to reconsider their interpretation of the previous chapter: the Professor wasn’t trying to trap Syme, but rather just to enlist his help.
Themes
Even though three of them were policemen, the Professor laments, they still couldn’t have taken on Sunday—who, they both agree, is frightening and must be stopped. They also both agree that they have to stop the bombing in Paris—and that to do so, they must find Dr. Bull, who is planning it. Fortunately, the Professor knows where he is, and he will lead Syme there. They go out into the grey night and walk to the riverbank, where the Professor points to Dr. Bull’s window in a high-rise tenement across the river. At just that moment, the light goes out, indicating that Dr. Bull has gone to bed.
Syme and the Professor agree that their most important priority is to stop Sunday and prevent the bombing. Over the next several chapters, this goal will serve as the driving force behind the novel’s plot. When Syme and the Professor look out at Dr. Bull’s tenement, this is the third time that Chesterton associates nighttime scenes on the banks of the River Thames with the fight between good and evil. (The first two were Syme’s encounter with the philosophical policeman and the scene in which he was elected as Thursday.) When Dr. Bull’s light goes out, this extends the same metaphor: again, darkness represents the sinister anarchist plot that threatens civilization. But this plot is also distant and incomprehensible, and it seems to be getting further away (and making less sense) the deeper Syme digs into it.
Themes
Syme and the policeman disguised as the Professor go to a dingy old inn for dinner. The food is excellent, and the men exchange stories. Syme explains how he got involved in the police, and then the other man explains that he’s really an actor named Wilks. There is a real Professor de Worms, a nihilist philosopher from Germany. In fact, Wilks once met the real Professor, then put on a show impersonating him. But his impersonation was so good that the audience thought that he really was the Professor, and that the real Professor was imitating him. The audience called the two Professors into the same room to debate who was real and who was fake. They chose Wilks, even though he spent the whole debate inventing fake philosophers. Afterwards, a police officer arrested Wilks on the street—and the chief hired him into the anti-anarchy campaign.
This scene takes the novel’s motif of truth, falsehood, and mistaken identity to a new extreme: Wilks impersonated the real Professor so believably that fiction prevailed over reality. The audience effectively took the real Professor’s identity away from him and handed it over to Wilks. Chesterton uses this plot point to suggest that people’s identities really depend on how other people view them. It’s also significant that the Professor is a nihilist philosopher and Wilks is an actor. Chesterton is suggesting that, when people give up on basic beliefs about morality and truth in the modern world, all meaning falls apart. After all, if anyone can pass for anyone else, then nobody is really anyone at all.
Themes
Literary Devices
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