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
Even though Wilks has revealed his true identity, he still drinks his wine slowly and sorrowfully, like the Professor. But he admits that he really is worried about something. Wilks asks if Syme plays the piano, and Syme says yes. Wilks replies that this solves his problem: if Syme has nimble fingers, then he'll be able to learn Wilks’s secret sign language, which they can use to communicate when they visit Dr. Bull tomorrow. Wilks explains the basics of the language, but Syme enjoys the challenge so much that he starts inventing signs for all sorts of complex, unnecessary words. He stays up late practicing the language.
Wilks’s behavior shows that, by impersonating the Professor for so long, in many ways he has really become the Professor. Chesterton suggests that, when people often put on disguises to hide their true identity, they often turn into the very disguise they were using. Meanwhile, the secret language is just another kind of disguise. Syme’s enthusiasm for it points to his lifelong affinity for mysteries, deception, and intrigue—which should encourage the reader to also question his elaborate theories about anarchism.
Themes
When he wakes up in the morning, Syme trusts the Professor entirely, but he dreads the dangers he knows they must face together. When Syme asks the Professor how he invented the secret language, the Professor doesn’t answer, and Syme starts to worry that the Professor isn’t really on his side. But then, he realizes that the Professor is sending him a secret message with his hands: “I will only talk like this.” They eat a quick breakfast on the street, then hustle across the river to Dr. Bull’s building. They climb the endless steps up to Dr. Bull’s tiny garret, where they find him writing at his table. Dr. Bull reminds Syme of the French Revolution, or of death itself. Syme and the Professor enter and sit with Dr. Bull at his table.
Syme’s paranoia about the Professor’s identity is understandable: so many of the people he has met on his journey so far have not truly been who they appeared to be. But it turns out to be unfounded. In fact, Chesterton is really using Syme’s paranoia to once again warn the reader about the dangers of modern skepticism about truth: if we see falsehood and deception all around us, then we can never truly be certain about anything. Syme associates Dr. Bull with death and the French Revolution for the same reason: both represent a breakdown in order (whether social or biological) that leads to chaos.
Themes
Literary Devices
The Professor very slowly tells Dr. Bull that he has important news about their plans in Paris—but it’s a long story. Compared to the Professor’s lethargy, Dr. Bull’s liveliness conveys “a sense of unbearable reality.” The Professor says that the full story is Syme’s, and he secretly signs to Syme that he's out of ideas. Syme tells Dr. Bull that he met a detective, got him drunk, and learned that the police are planning to arrest the Marquis. But Dr. Bull continues smiling and staring, his expression unchanged.
Syme gets caught between the Professor’s tedious lies and Dr. Bull’s “sense of unbearable reality.” This functions as a metaphor for Syme’s psychological state throughout the novel: he loses track of what’s true and what isn’t, and he ends up deceiving others for what he believes to be the sake of the greater good. After all, Dr. Bull’s frozen, obviously fake smile suggests that he’s hiding something, too.
Themes
Syme starts signing to the Professor that he’s had an important, poetic intuition—but the Professor tells him not to say anything, then starts ignoring him. Syme speaks anyway: he asks Dr. Bull to take his glasses off. The Professor stares at Syme in shock, and without a word, Dr. Bull removes his glasses. The hazel, starlike eyes behind them make him look like a common, innocent young boy. Syme announces that Dr. Bull can’t possibly be an anarchist, and he shows Dr. Bull his blue policeman’s card. The Professor reluctantly pulls out his own blue card—and then Dr. Bull starts laughing and does the same.
Clearly, there’s a pattern forming. Dr. Bull, too, is really with Syme, not against him. It's significant that Syme associates his intuitions about Bull with poetry: whereas his logical theories lead him astray, his artistic instincts point him to the truth. This suggests that, for Chesterton, the analytical reasoning of science might actually be less reliable than the spontaneous emotions of art. Finally, Dr. Bull’s glasses are a concise metaphor for Chesterton’s attitude about good and evil: Bull disguised the shining beauty and benevolence of his eyes as evil by covering them up with dark glasses.
Themes
Literary Devices
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Syme, the Professor, and Dr. Bull descend to the street. They point out that, between them and Gogol, most of the men on the council were actually police. Dr. Bull explains that, when he became a detective, he looked too honest and innocent to go undercover, until a higher-up in the police gave him the devilish, smoky glasses. In fact, this higher-up was the chief who hired them all—and he figured this out in the pitch-black room, without ever seeing Dr. Bull’s face.
Syme and the Professor win another ally in their fight against anarchism. It’s puzzling that the mysterious police chief would hire multiple detectives to infiltrate the Central Anarchist Council without telling them about one another—and that he would know how to make Dr. Bull look evil without ever seeing his face. It’s understandable that readers may start to question the chief’s true identity and motives.
Themes
The men reach the rail station, where Dr. Bull arranges their tickets. In a short time, they’re on a boat to France. Dr. Bull explains that he had to send the Marquis with the bomb, because the President (Sunday) was following him around and watching him. The men agree that they should get Dr. Bull arrested once they reach Calais, but then they realize that they have all sworn never to turn in the anarchists to the police. They conclude that it will be the three of them against the Secretary, the Marquis, and—worst of all—the President.
While it’s relatively insignificant to the plot, thematically, it’s quite notable that Sunday successfully manipulated Dr. Bull into giving the Marquis the bomb. This shows that the anarchist conspiracy actually couldn’t have succeeded without the detectives’ help. In other words, the forces of good unwittingly became the forces of evil. Yet they still decide to keep their promises to not give up the anarchists, which shows that they still believe that they should hold themselves to higher moral standards than their sinister anarchist counterparts.
Themes
Syme concludes that the men must stop the Marquis from leaving Calais, but without denouncing, detaining, or kidnapping him. He starts talking about the Syme and St. Eustache family history, and the other men think he’s crazy. But then he clarifies: he will challenge the Marquis to a duel. The men disembark the boat and walk down the seashore to a café where they see the Marquis sitting.
Modern readers may not know that, when this novel was published in the early 1900s, dueling was already uncommon in France. Thus, Syme’s proposal involves a conscious throwback to outdated aristocratic traditions—the same traditions that the Marquis’s wealth and title also represent. Chesterton will use this duel as a way to present (and mock) different ideas about the place of tradition in the modern world.
Themes
