AN IMPOSSIBLE TASK PROVED IMPOSSIBLE:
THE CONCLUSION OF G.K. CHESTERTON'S
G.K. Chesterton's novel The Man Who Was Thursday poses a knotty problem to the reader. The novel is a double allegory, examining the nature of evil both in the political realm and in the spiritual realm. The plot concerns a group of anarchists who appear devoted to destroying the world through violent means. However, one by one, they are all revealed to be policemen who have infiltrated the anarchist group and were unable to reveal themselves to the others. The great joke of the book is that the central anarchist council of the entire world is made up almost entirely of policemen who are all unaware of the fact.
This plot convention arose out of a combination of Chesterton's orthodox Catholic theology, his concern regarding the nature of spiritual evil, and his concern as a citizen of Europe about the growing dangers of the anarchist movement:
Overt anarchism, culminating in a series of murders, including those of a president of the USA, a King of Italy, a Prime Minister of Spain and an Empress of Austria, was a political fact of the time. Chesterton's novel, as much as [Joseph] Conrad's very different The Secret Agent, grew out of a recognition of this danger (Coates 215).
Thus the novel, though an allegory, is solidly grounded in reality, dealing with real people and real concerns: that is, until the concluding chapter.
Like Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, the conclusion of this novel severely departs from what preceded it. Though the novel is subtitled "A Nightmare," it adheres to the principles of reality until suddenly, in the last pages, it veers into a whirlwind of fantasy, symbolism, philosophical abstractions, personification and Biblical allusions. The concluding chapter is a series of dream images and metaphysical meditations as if Chesterton were reaching toward the ineffable. What had been a fairly straightforward allegory sudde...