The Man Who Was Thursday is a religious allegory that Chesterton uses to deal with the question of whether it is possible to find meaning in a world without God. In Chapter 12, Inspector Ratcliffe’s declaration of hope in the face of the oncoming anarchist horde is a clear example of religious allegory:
“No; oddly enough I am not quite hopeless. There is one insane little hope that I cannot get out of my mind. The power of this whole planet is against us, yet I cannot help wondering whether this one silly little hope is hopeless yet.”
“In what or whom is your hope?” asked Syme with curiosity.
“In a man I never saw,” said the other, looking at the leaden sea.
“I know what you mean,” said Syme in a low voice, “the man in the dark room. But Sunday must have killed him by now.”
Ratcliffe’s hope in “the man in the dark room” is a direct expression of faith in a power greater than himself. The blind trust he grabs onto in his desperate bid to outlast the detectives’ pursuers demonstrates Chesterton’s belief that belief in a higher power is essential to finding a meaning in life. It is this faith in this mysterious man which compels all of the detectives forward, regardless of the fact that he is later revealed to actually be Sunday himself. In this way, the character of Sunday functions somewhere along the line of a godlike, messiah-like figure, leading the detectives to rediscover their faith in the world.
While the detectives try to search for meaning in a world descending into anarchism, they find the beginning of their answer only when they enter the absurdist heavenly carnival realm near the end of the novel. As Syme and the other detectives wear their new garments representing each of the seven days of creation, they metaphorically and physically embrace god. Notably, Chesterton does not provide any easy answers regarding the central conflicts of the story—he leaves that task up to his readers’ faith in God. Through this religious allegory, Chesterton explores the moral trap that people fall into when they succumb to faithlessness.
