The Man Who Was Thursday

by

G. K. Chesterton

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on The Man Who Was Thursday makes teaching easy.
Chesterton’s narrator is omniscient and speaks in the third person, but mostly presents the story through the lens of Gabriel Syme’s thoughts, actions, and feelings. For instance, the narrator never reveals any of the other main characters’ true identities until Syme finds out about them. When the narrator does reveal hidden information about other characters, it’s often intended to throw the reader off, which builds suspense later on. For instance, at the beginning of the novel, the narrator presents Lucian Gregory as the hero. The narrator also frequently uses irony and describes the environment—and especially the sky—in rich, descriptive language.

The Narrator Quotes in The Man Who Was Thursday

The The Man Who Was Thursday quotes below are all either spoken by The Narrator or refer to The Narrator. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Order, Chaos, and God Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1 Quotes

The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout; its skyline was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild. […] It had to be considered not so much as a workshop for artists, but as a frail but finished work of art. A man who stepped into its social atmosphere felt as if he had stepped into a written comedy.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Lucian Gregory
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 1-2
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

Gabriel Syme was not merely a detective who pretended to be a poet; he was really a poet who had become a detective. Nor was his hatred of anarchy hypocritical. He was one of those who are driven early in life into too conservative an attitude by the bewildering folly of most revolutionists. He had not attained it by any tame tradition. His respectability was spontaneous and sudden, a rebellion against rebellion.

[…]

Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy Gabriel had to revolt into something so he revolted into the only thing left—sanity. But there was just enough in him of the blood of these fanatics to make even his protest for common sense a little too fierce to be sensible.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Gabriel Syme
Page Number: 29
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

Syme had never thought of asking whether the monstrous man who almost filled and broke the balcony was the great President of whom the others stood in awe. He knew it was so, with an unaccountable but instantaneous certainty. Syme, indeed, was one of those men who are open to all the more nameless psychological influences in a degree a little dangerous to mental health. Utterly devoid of fear in physical dangers, he was a great deal too sensitive to the smell of spiritual evil. Twice already that night little unmeaning things had peeped out at him almost pruriently, and given him a sense of drawing nearer and nearer to the headquarters of hell. And this sense became overpowering as he drew nearer to the great President.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Gabriel Syme, The President/The Police Chief/Sunday
Page Number: 42-43
Explanation and Analysis:

He had thought at first that they were all of common stature and costume, with the evident exception of the hairy Gogol. But as he looked at the others, he began to see in each of them exactly what he had seen in the man by the river, a demoniac detail somewhere. That lop-sided laugh, which would suddenly disfigure the fine face of his original guide, was typical of all these types. Each man had something about him, perceived perhaps at the tenth or twentieth glance, which was not normal, and which seemed hardly human. The only metaphor he could think of was this, that they all looked as men of fashion and presence would look, with the additional twist given in a false and curved mirror.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Gabriel Syme, The Secretary/Monday, Gogol/Tuesday
Page Number: 44-45
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

A barrel-organ in the street suddenly sprang with a jerk into a jovial tune. Syme stood up taut, as if it had been a bugle before the battle. He found himself filled with a supernatural courage that came from nowhere. The jingling music seemed full of the vivacity, the vulgarity, and the irrational valour of the poor, who in all those unclean streets were all clinging to the decencies and the charities of Christendom. […] He did feel himself as the ambassador of all these common and kindly people in the street, who every day marched into battle to the music of the barrel-organ. And this high pride in being human had lifted him unaccountably to an infinite height above the monstrous men around him.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Gabriel Syme, The President/The Police Chief/Sunday
Page Number: 52
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

Every movement of the old man’s tottering figure and vague hands, every uncertain gesture and panic-stricken pause, seemed to put it beyond question that he was helpless, that he was in the last imbecility of the body. He moved by inches, he let himself down with little gasps of caution. And yet, unless the philosophical entities called time and space have no vestige even of a practical existence, it appeared quite unquestionable that he had run after the omnibus.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Gabriel Syme, The Professor de Worms/Wilks/Friday
Page Number: 61
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

Syme had for a flash the sensation that the cosmos had turned exactly upside down, that all the trees were growing downwards and that all stars were under his feet. Then came slowly the opposite conviction. For the last twenty-four hours the cosmos had really been upside down, but now the capsized universe had come right side up again. The devil from whom he had been fleeing all day was only an elder brother of his own house, who on the other side of the table lay back and laughed at him.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Gabriel Syme, The Professor de Worms/Wilks/Friday
Page Number: 67
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

Syme was increasingly conscious that his new adventure had somehow a quality of cold sanity worse than the wild adventures of the past. Last night, for instance, the tall tenements had seemed to him like a tower in a dream. As he now went up the weary and perpetual steps, he was daunted and bewildered by their almost infinite series. But it was not the hot horror of a dream or of anything that might be exaggeration or delusion. Their infinity was more like the empty infinity of arithmetic, something unthinkable, yet necessary to thought. Or it was like the stunning statements of astronomy about the distance of the fixed stars. He was ascending the house of reason, a thing more hideous than unreason itself.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Gabriel Syme
Page Number: 81
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

He felt a strange and vivid value in all the earth around him, in the grass under his feet; he felt the love of life in all living things. He could almost fancy that he heard the grass growing; he could almost fancy that even as he stood fresh flowers were springing up and breaking into blossom in the meadow—flowers blood-red and burning gold and blue, fulfilling the whole pageant of the spring. And whenever his eyes strayed for a flash from the calm, staring, hypnotic eyes of the Marquis, they saw the little tuft of almond tree against the skyline. He had the feeling that if by some miracle he escaped he would be ready to sit for ever before that almond tree, desiring nothing else in the world.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Gabriel Syme, The Marquis de St. Eustache/Inspector Ratcliffe/Wednesday
Page Number: 97
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

Was he wearing a mask? Was anyone wearing a mask? Was anyone anything? This wood of witchery in which men’s faces turned black and white by turns, in which their figures first swelled into sunlight and then faded into formless night, this mere chaos of chiaroscuro (after the clear daylight outside) seemed to Syme a perfect symbol of the world in which he had been moving for three days. […] Was not everything, after all, like this bewildering woodland, this dance of dark and light? Everything only a glimpse, the glimpse always unforeseen, and always forgotten. For Gabriel Syme had found in the heart of that sun-splashed wood what many modern painters had found there. He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Gabriel Syme, The Marquis de St. Eustache/Inspector Ratcliffe/Wednesday
Page Number: 107-108
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12 Quotes

The next instant the automobile had come with a catastrophic jar against an iron object. The instant after that four men had crawled out from under a chaos of metal, and a tall lean lamp-post that had stood up straight on the edge of the marine parade stood out, bent and twisted, like the branch of a broken tree.

“Well, we smashed something,” said the Professor, with a faint smile. “That’s some comfort.”

“You’re becoming an anarchist,” said Syme, dusting his clothes with his instinct of daintiness.

“Everyone is,” said Ratcliffe.

Related Characters: Gabriel Syme (speaker), The Professor de Worms/Wilks/Friday (speaker), The Narrator (speaker)
Page Number: 123
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

The six adventurers had passed through many adventures, but not one had carried them so utterly off their feet as this last adventure of comfort. They had all become inured to things going roughly; but things suddenly going smoothly swamped them. They could not even feebly imagine what the carriages were; it was enough for them to know that they were carriages, and carriages with cushions. They could not conceive who the old man was who had led them; but it was quite enough that he had certainly led them to the carriages.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker)
Page Number: 147-148
Explanation and Analysis:

But though he affected to despise the mummery, he felt a curious freedom and naturalness in his movements as the blue and gold garment fell about him; and when he found that he had to wear a sword, it stirred a boyish dream. As he passed out of the room he flung the folds across his shoulder with a gesture, his sword stood out at an angle, and he had all the swagger of a troubadour. For these disguises did not disguise, but reveal.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Gabriel Syme
Related Symbols: The Divine Clothing
Page Number: 150
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

“Who and what are you?”

“I am the Sabbath,” said the other without moving. “I am the peace of God.”

The Secretary started up, and stood crushing his costly robe in his hand.

“I know what you mean,” he cried, “and it is exactly that that I cannot forgive you. I know you are contentment, optimism, what do they call the thing, an ultimate reconciliation. Well, I am not reconciled. If you were the man in the dark room, why were you also Sunday, an offence to the sunlight? If you were from the first our father and our friend, why were you also our greatest enemy? We wept, we fled in terror; the iron entered into our souls—and you are the peace of God! Oh, I can forgive God His anger, though it destroyed nations; but I cannot forgive Him His peace.”

Related Characters: The President/The Police Chief/Sunday (speaker), The Secretary/Monday (speaker), The Narrator (speaker)
Page Number: 154-155
Explanation and Analysis:

“Have you,” he cried in a dreadful voice, “have you ever suffered?”

As he gazed, the great face grew to an awful size, grew larger than the colossal mask of Memnon, which had made him scream as a child. It grew larger and larger, filling the whole sky; then everything went black. Only in the blackness before it entirely destroyed his brain he seemed to hear a distant voice saying a commonplace text that he had heard somewhere, “Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?”

Related Characters: The President/The Police Chief/Sunday (speaker), The Narrator (speaker), Lucian Gregory (speaker)
Page Number: 157
Explanation and Analysis:

[Syme] could only remember that gradually and naturally he knew that he was and had been walking along a country lane with an easy and conversational companion. That companion had been a part of his recent drama; it was the red-haired poet Gregory. They were walking like old friends, and were in the middle of a conversation about some triviality. But Syme could only feel an unnatural buoyancy in his body and a crystal simplicity in his mind that seemed to be superior to everything that he said or did. He felt he was in possession of some impossible good news, which made every other thing a triviality, but an adorable triviality.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Gabriel Syme, Lucian Gregory
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 158
Explanation and Analysis:
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