“A Great Day” has usually been admired by literary critics, who point out that a number of Sargeson stories, including “Sale Day” and “Old Man’s Story,” have similarly violent climaxes. David Norton, in “Two Views of Frank Sargeson’s Short Stories,” has categorized the story as “an elaborated fable without the moral supplied: it can be taken as demonstrating the weakness of strength and the dangers of underestimating the weak.” According to Helen Shaw, also in “Two Views of Frank Sargeson’s Short Stories,” “A Great Day” shows “deep insight into repression. If something deeply desired is repressed and for too long trapped in the hideout of the Unconscious, it may escape.” Shaw sees this theme of the repression of desires, with unfortunate or evil consequences, operating in a number of Sargeson’s short stories.

Not all critics or reviewers have evaluated “A Great Day” favorably, however. Norman Levine, in an otherwise appreciative review of Sargeson’s Collected Stories in Spectator, declared that when Sargeson tried to write a conventional story such as “A Great Day,” which Levine described as “the story with the sting in its tail,” he was “not very effective.” Critic J. C. Reid had a more wideranging complaint against Sargeson’s stories, arguing that there was an emphasis “on violence, on mental aberrations, on the sordid, the cruel, the bitter . . . a total effect of cynicism from which health is absent” (quoted in C. K. Stead’s Kin of Place: Essays on 20 New Zealand Writers).

In an unusual reading of “A Great Day,” Joost Daalder, in “Violence in the Stories of Frank Sargeson,” argues that Sargeson intended the reader to sympathize with Fred rather than censure him for his murder of Ken: “[T]he whole strategy of the story is aimed at justifying a man who gets his own back on a rival by drowning him.” Daalder’s point is that Ken destroyed the ideal relationship between Fred and Mary and is therefore to blame for what happens to him.