The Man Who Was Thursday

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 con

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allusions. "I am the Sabbath," says Sunday, and "Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?" He furthermore tries to offer a sensible explanation by pointing to the subtitle of the book: Hardly anyone who looked at the title ever seems to have looked at the subtitle; which was "A Nightmare," and the answer to a good many critical questions (Chesterton, Autobiography, 98). Chesterton seems to want it both ways. He seems to want to offer a final explanation and at the same time to hide behind the obtuse imagery of the conclusion by calling his book a dream narrative, unbeholden to strictures of narrative consistency. In a certain sense, then, the book does indeed share much in common with the Book of Job. The answer to the query of Job is the answer to the query of the reader; God is transcendent and inscrutable. The confusion of the end is merely the confusion of those who would pry too deeply into God's business. Job does not receive an answer from God, and so why should the characters expect an answer from Sunday or the reader expect an answer from Chesterton? Critics who continue to offer plausible explanations of the book's conclusion might be likened to Job's comforters, giving plausible but hypothesized answers where what m
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Approximate Word count = 2554
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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