The Man Who was Thursday - Witold Ostrowski (essay date 1984)
Witold Ostrowski (essay date 1984)
SOURCE: "The Man Who Was Thursday," in Litterae et Lingua: In Honorem Premislavi Mroczkowski, edited by Jan Nowakowski, Zaklad Narodowy im. Ossolinakich, 1984, pp. 141-52.
[In the following essay, Ostrowski examines the relationship between the conventions of detective novels, the phenomena of nightmares, and the structure of The Man Who Was Thursday.]
G. K. Chesterton's book The Man Who Was Thursday is one of the most curious and interesting literary compositions to a scholar who studies the relationship between the meaning and the structure and the typology of the novel.
Chesterton himself saw in the book "the very formless form of a piece of fiction", but a form justified by the fact that it was related to a nightmare. In fact, writing in his Autobiography about the disorientation of the critics which the book had provoked, he says: "But what interests me about it was this;...
[The entire page is 6104 words long]
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