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.

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; that hardly anybody who looked at the title ever seems to have looked at the sub-title; which was 'A Nightmare', and the answer to a good many critical questions."

NIGHTMARE AS MEANING AND FORM

Perhaps the best starting point for an analysis of this novel is to take the hint from the author and to concentrate on the word Nightmare. It implies both a certain characteristic content and a certain form in which the unpleasant content is presented.

The nightmarish character of the experience which had inspired Chesterton to write about it has been described in detail in the dedicatory poem "To Edmund Clerihew Bentley," which begins with the words:

A cloud was on the mind of men,
And wailing went the weather,
Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul
When we were boys together.

The poem refers to The Man Who Was Thursday thus:

This is a tale of those old fears,
Even of those emptied hells,
And none but you shall understand
The true thing that it tells—

because "those old fears" were

The doubts that drove us through the night
As we two talked amain
And day had broken on the streets
E'er it broke upon the brain.

The experience of spiritual doubts and fears wafted, as it were, from the City of Dreadful Night known to J. Thomson and the 1890's had been a very personal kind of nightmare shared and therefore understood only by the two close friends. But when it found its literary expression in Chesterton's story, owing to his idiosyncrasy it became "an extraordinary book written as if the publisher had commissioned him to write something rather like The Pilgrim's Progress in the style of the Pickwick Papers" as Monsignor Knox has said [In the panegyric preached at Westminster Cathedral, 27 June 1936. Quotation after Maise Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 1958].

If the effect is not Kafka, it is due to the simple truth that Chesterton could not write like Kafka any more than Kafka could write like Chesterton.

But if the exuberant energy of the story seems rather to deny it the title of a nightmare, its structure perfectly confirms it. For the world presented in the story has many features of a dream. Its dreamlike quality is stressed on the very first page of the novel:

The place was not only pleasant, but perfect, if once he could regard it not as a deception but rather as a dream.

There is a strange, unrealistic atmosphere about the setting of the book which suggests an unusual state of consciousness even before the dream begins. This is how a "strange sunset" is evoked and perceived:

It looked like the end of the world. All the heaven seemed covered with a quite vivid and palpable plumage; you could only say that the sky was full of feathers, and of feathers that almost brushed the face. Across the great part of the dome they were grey, with the strangest tints of violet and mauve and an unnatural pink or pale green; but towards the west the whole grew past description, transparent and passionate, and the last red-hot plumes of it covered up the sun like something too good to be seen. The whole was so close about the earth as to express nothing but a violent secrecy.

The writer gives this unusual state of consciousness and its characteristic perception of the world to his main character, the poet Gabriel Syme. During his dispute with Lucian Gregory, another poet (and anarchist):

Once he heard very faintly in some distant street a barrel-organ begin to play, and it seemed to him that his heroic words were moving to a tiny tune from under or beyond the world.

He stared and talked at the girl's red hair and amused face for what seemed to be a few minutes; and then, feeling that the groups in such a place should mix, rose to his feet. To his astonishment, he discovered the whole garden empty. Everyone had gone long ago, and he went himself with a rather hurried apology. He left with a sense of champagne in his head, which he could not afterwards explain. In the wild events which were to follow this girl had no part at all; he never saw her again until all his tale was over. And yet, in some indescribable way, she kept returning like a motive in music through all his mad adventures like a red thread through those dark and ill-drawn tapestries of the night. For what followed was so improbable that it might well have been a dream.

The last quoted sentence is the author's sly signal that what follows is a dream. It is sly, because usually the reader does not pay proper attention to it; but formally it is as good, or almost as good, a warning of the change of the hero's mode of experience as Langland's words: "I fell asleep. And I dreamt a marvellous dream" or Bunyan's: "And as I slept, I dreamed a Dream".

The return to the day-consciousness is marked about the end of the story with a row of asterisks followed by the words:

When men in books awake from a vision, they commonly find themselves in some place in which they might have fallen asleep; they yawn in a chair, or lift themselves with bruised limbs from a field. Syme's experience was something much more psychologically strange if there was indeed anything unreal, in the earthly sense, about the things he had gone through. For while he could always remember afterwards that he had swooned before the face of Sunday, he could not remember having ever come to at all. He could only remember that gradually and naturally he knew that he was and had been walking along a country lane with an easy and conversational companion.

The disturbances of memory, so frequently associated with remembering dreams, were accompanied by a feeling of "an unnatural buoyancy in his body and a crystal simplicity in his mind".

In stressing the similarity between older dream-visions in fiction and The Man Who Was Thursday we should not, however, close our eyes to the strange lack of sharpness in the transition from Syme's reality to his dream and back. The explanation why Chesterton does not follow Langland's and Bunyan's examples of sincerity and precision, but tricks the reader with: "What followed was so improbable that it might well have been a dream", is simple: he wants the reader accept, for a time, the dream for reality. This is the trick practised in modern times by many writers introducing improbable tales.

Chesterton's ambiguity in the quoted passage which describes awakening is less conventional. Let us try to understand what he means by saying: "Syme's experience was something much more psychologically strange if there was indeed anything unreal, in the earthly sense about the things he had gone through" and when he states that Syme "could not remember ever come to at all".

The answer is that the narrator of the adventures wants them to be both a nightmare in a dream and, at the same time, a real and valid human experience. In this Chesterton not only follows modern psychology, which accepts dreams as real and valid human experiences, but also follows Langland, the author of The Pearl, and Bunyan. All these "dreamers" spiritually grow up in the course of their dreams. The same thing happens with Syme, because Chesterton considers his message as of the utmost importance.

There is yet another feature which makes the story like a nightmare and distinguishes it as one of the most original literary creations. It is the fluidity of the presented world. Its world, instead of being merely fantastic or even mad, but one with its own stability, constantly changes into another and yet another world. It reminds one of the croquet ground in Alice in Wonderland in which the croquet balls were live hedgehogs, and the mallets live flamingoes and the soldiers had to double themselves up and stand on their hands and feet, to make the arches. All those elements of the game moved of their own will and playing the game was very difficult.

Something like that happens in The Man Who Was Thursday. Characters change not only their looks, but even identities, becoming somebody or something else. The setting changes in quick succession in the unending scenes of escape and pursuit and underneath it some disquieting cosmic dimensions are felt. And the story which began in the world of politics, changes into a street carnival rag and frolic to develop into a philosophical garden party to evaporate into total blackness. Its end seems to forget its own beginning.

SUSPICION OF CRIME AND NEED FOR DETECTION

The starting point for action is a suspicion of crime and need for detection. Syme has insinuated himself into the Anarchist Lodge's favour and has been elected Thursday, one of the seven members of the Supreme Council of Anarchy, though he is a philosophical (or ideological) policeman. Both he and his friend and ideological opponent Gregory may fear the consequences of mutual exposure and both are bound by a reciprocal pledge to be silent about each other's ideological stance.

The situation has two aspects. One is philosophical. It is revealed when Syme asks Gregory: "What is it you object to? You want to abolish Government?"

Gregory's answer shows his militant atheism, or rather anti-theism, and moral nihilism:

To abolish God!… We do not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations: that sort of anarchism does exist, but it is mere branch of the Nonconformists. We dig deeper and we blow you higher. We wish to deny all those arbitrary distinctions of vice and virtue, honour and treachery, upon which mere rebels base themselves. The silly sentimentalists of the French Revolution talked of the Rights of Man! We hate Rights as we hate Wrongs. We have abolished Right and Wrong.

The other aspect of the situation is political and social. Its dangers are more limited, but also more immediate. Syme has developed a "hatred of modern lawlessness", because he experienced a dynamite outrage which broke windows, made him blind and deaf for a moment, and wounded some people. Anarchist terrorism has become "a huge and pitiless peril" for him. And at the same moment he joined the Anarchist Council, the Czar was to meet the President of France and a bomb attempt was being prepared to kill the two. Crime is being planned and Syme's duty as a policeman is to counteract it, especially as he had been received into the secret police to take part in what his mysterious chief in a dark room had called "the battle of Armageddon" and "the Last Crusade" even at the risk of martyrdom. So the starting point of the adventurous action is the pursuit of criminal terrorists.

But these criminals are criminals raised to at least a second power. "The common criminal is a bad man, but at least he is—says Syme—as it were, a conditional good man. He says that if only a certain obstacle be removed—say a wealthy uncle—he is then prepared to accept the universe and to praise God. He is a reformer, but not an anarchist. He wishes to cleanse the edifice, but not to destroy it. But the evil philosopher is not trying to alter things, but to annihilate them".

Syme the policeman suspects that it is the Anarchist Council of which he has become a member that forms the mind and heart of that all-destructive programme or plan which was revealed to him by Gregory as the ultimate essence of anarchism. The need for detection is created. But at the same time a new motive force interferes with the detective's intention—the impulse of escape and pursuit. Among "the six men who had sworn to destroy the world" seeds of fear and suspicion are sown by Sunday's warning of the presence of a traitor among them. Then Gogol, the pretended Pole with the decidedly Russian name, is exposed as a detective with the same kind of blue card as Syme's. And Sunday suggests that this detection of an enemy may not be the end of the purge.

This suggestion comes home and Syme becomes wary while walking London streets in a snowstorm. He soon finds that he is being pursued by a half-paralytic Professor de Worms and has no doubt left about the matter when the old man chases him like a greyhound. Their mutual confession of being both in the police is one of the turning points in the action of the story. Syme says about Sunday:

I am afraid of him. Therefore I swear by God that I will seek out this man whom I fear until I find him, and strike him on the mouth. If heaven were his throne and the earth his footstool, I swear that I would pull him down.

Here the idea of detection and the idea of pursuit unite. Henceforth Syme will pursue Sunday in order to detect his mystery. The action of the novel will become a chain of chases in order to detect what is endlessly escaping. Syme's declaration is the more important, because, in the perspective of the final chapters of the novel, his detective activities will continue even if Sunday should turn out to be the lord of heaven and earth.

He is not alone. The professor joins him and the following day in the early morning they surprise the sinister-looking Dr Bull who, without his dark spectacles, is revealed as a harmless young man. He is the third policeman and they plan stopping the anarchist Marquis who was to go to Paris to throw a bomb at the Czar visiting the President of France. Syme wants to stop the Marquis at Calais by engaging him in a duel and his efforts are rewarded at least with a revelation that he fights against a fellow detective.

Each of the chapters of the novel following Gogol's exposure seems to bring a new revelation of reality. In Chapter IX it is revealed that appearances deceive—nobody is what he seems to be. In Chapter X men of the same purpose fight each other and are ready to die doing so. In Chapters XI and XII entitled (from the point of appearances) "The Criminals Chase the Police" and "The Earth in Anarchy," even the friends of the law and order—the peasant, the innkeeper, the rich townsman, and the French colonel—all turn against the bewildered detectives and at last their friend Dr Renard goes so far as to shoot at them.

It seems that each new discovery brings more and more confusion and nonsense in the strife for law and order. In the end the pursued members of the Supreme Council of Anarchy realize that there was no council of this kind and that they were chased by the police and the crowd, because they were taken for anarchists. Here, by the way, Chesterton makes consciously or unconsciously, his greatest point against the lunacy of conspiracy. Conspiracy provokes counter-conspiracy and then nobody knows who is what and against whom. (The same point was made two years earlier by Joseph Conrad in The Secret Agent).

But this political point is implied only. The funny and absurd incidents in France are serious not so much because they belong to politics, but because they acquire, increasingly, a solemn, metaphysical or even religious dimension. The "battle" at Lancy has some relation to "the battle of Armageddon" mentioned by the invisible police chief when he had received Syme into his service. Duelling, Syme thinks that he is fighting the Devil. Later he fights lighting his way in the falling darkness with an ancient lantern with a cross. The shout "The morning star has fallen!" is an obvious allusion to the fall of Lucifer, even though it refers to a friend's apparent betrayal. The six lines quoted from Dunciad expressly refer to a cosmic cataclysm in which Chaos and Anarchy begin to reign in universal darkness. They are introduced in a seemingly hopeless moment when "the Earth in Anarchy" makes "the hopeless Inspector" say: "The human being will soon be extinct. We are the last of mankind".

This is not yet the end, though. The five detectives are wiser at least by the discovery that "there never was any Supreme Anarchist Council" and that they are "all a lot of silly policemen looking at each other". The next obvious step is the pursuit of the President. This takes place in Chapters XIII and XIV mostly in London. Sunday jumps down from the hotel balcony and runs away in all possible means of transport, clowning in a wonderful circus parade round London until he soars up in a balloon stolen from the Earl's Court Exhibition.

Behind these farcical externals there is a serious purpose. The pursuit started with the need to find out what Sunday was. "What did it all mean? If they were all harmless officers, what was Sunday? If he had not seized the world, what on earth had he been up to?… Whatever else Sunday is, he isn't a blameless citizen". It is, again, the need for investigation, for acting on suspicion and for detection that moves all the six policemen to action.

Sunday's behaviour in their presence only deepens the riddle. He laughs at them and then declares: "I tell you this, that you will have found out the truth of the last tree and the topmost cloud before the truth about me. You will understand the sea and I shall be still a riddle"… "Since the beginning of the world all men have hunted me like a wolf—kings and sages, and poets and law-givers, all the churches, and all the philosophers. But I have never been caught yet.…"

And he sharpens their curiosity by stating: "There's one thing I'll tell you, though, about who I am. I am the man in the dark room, who made you all policemen". This and his escape from the balcony are an irresistible stimulus to the natural policeman. The investigation changes into a chase.

PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY FIND THE ANSWER

The careful reader of the book will observe that ever since Sunday declared himself to be a riddle to all kinds of men, a riddle like the riddle of the tree, the cloud, and the sea—he begins to change from a man into Nature. The policemen following him across the fields of Surrey become "six philosophers" who express their impressions and guesses about his nature. Each man finds Sunday quite different, but all of them compare him to the universe. His back looks brutal and beastlike; his face an archangel's. Syme says: "When I saw him from behind I was certain he was an animal, and when I saw him in front I knew he was a god". "Pan was a god and an animal"—confirms the Professor.

Here Syme identifies "the mystery of Sunday" with "the mystery of the world". At last he sums up his philosophical conclusions in this way: "Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal… Cannot you see that everything is stopping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front—".

Once this understanding of the dualism or ambivalence of Nature, and consequently of the world, and consequently of the ecology and existence of man is realized, the balloon carrying Sunday descends and the pursuers become his welcome guests.

The atmosphere changes again with the change of the setting. An old servant in the peaceful twilight of the evening, a white road, six carriages waiting for the guests, a countryhouse in a park which makes each man of them declare "that he could remember this place before he could remember his mother" suggest an unexpected ease and comfort, but also an allegory of coming home after a life full of strife and anxiety. Also in this Chapter XIV, entitled "The Six Philosopher," the Biblical allusions are continued ("Why leap ye, ye high hills?"; "It was like the face of some ancient archangel, judging justly after heroic wars".). Now it is the Bible that "provides" for every guest a role to be played at a fancy dress party that is being prepared and a costume symbolizing one of the Days of Creation according to Genesis.

Chapter XV begins with a pageantry reminiscent of medieval allegories, but instead of the Seven Deadly Sins we meet the Seven Days of Creation seating themselves on stone thrones surrounded with forest and lit by bonfires with cauldrons on them. Dancing proceeds until the fires almost die out, the merry-makers disappear into the house and stars come out. Then Sunday in his white robe sums up his own view of the events. He says:

Let us remain together a little, we who loved each other so sadly, and have fought so long. I seem to remember only centuries of heroic war, in which you were always heroes—epic on epic, iliad on iliad, and you always brothers in arms. Whether it was but recently (for time is nothing), or at the beginning of the world, I sent you out to war. I sat in the darkness, where there is not any created thing, and to you I was only a voice commanding valour and an unnatural virtue. You heard the voice in the dark, and you never heard it again. The sun in heaven denied it, the earth and sky denied it, all human wisdom denied it. And when I met you in the daylight I denied it myself.

This is a confirmation of Sunday's ambivalence. This is also a timeless presentation of life as an endless struggle of men to keep their human dignity, for Sunday adds: "You did not forget your secret honour, though the whole cosmos turned an engine of torture to tear it out of you".

But then the final question in the investigation of Sunday's mystery is asked "in a harsh voice":

"Who and what are you"? And the answer is: "I
am Sabbath. I am the peace of God."

This answer, instead of pacifying the six, rouses their dissatisfaction in varying degrees. Only one of them says: "I understand nothing, but I am happy". The strongest objection and criticism comes from the Secretary:

I know what you mean… and it is exactly that that I cannot forgive you… I am not reconciled. If you were the man in the dark room, why were you also Sunday, an offence to the sunlight? If you were from the first our father and our friend, why were you also our greatest enemy? We wept, we fled in terror; the iron entered our souls—and you are the peace of God! Oh, I can forgive God His anger, though it destroyed nations; but I cannot forgive Him His peace.

Here the encounter with Nature, which developed out of the encounter with Sunday the man, rises to the level of an encounter with God himself responsible for the creation of the universe and the condition of man. This is the moment for the only cosmic anarchist to appear—for Gregory. And he impersonates Satan. This is explicitly stated by Dr Bull who says: "Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them". This is an exact quotation from The Book of Job in the Authorized Version. In its context the title of this last chapter of the novel—"The Accuser" and its whole content acquire a decidedly Biblical significance. The Book of Job is a book about the suffering of the blameless man, which had been provoked by Satan's contention that man serves God only for something that he receives. Job, the sufferer afflicted by Satan through the permission of God, comes victorious out of the trial, but his protest against the obvious injustice of his lot sounds very much like the Secretary's protest against the peace of God while people are suffering.

"Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward… Man, that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He comes forth like a flower and is cut down"—these are the most familiar quotations from the Book and they are in tune with the Secretary's accusation of complacency.

But the Accuser, who says about himself "I am a destroyer" has something more to say.

The thick texture of the novel does not allow us to analyse it on one level at a time so this is the moment in which the reader ought to be reminded that all that has so far happened and all that is to come is the logical development of the question of who and what Sunday is and whether he is a blameless person. By this time he has turned into Nature and the Peace of God crowning the Creation. The investigation of his identity seems at an end, but not the judgement on him. Gregory will act as the Accuser and Syme as the Defence.

But, by an ironic twist, what in the Bible was the congregation of the Sons of God sitting in judgement over the tried man and what has already turned into a trial of God by men now is becoming trial of God and man prosecuted by Satan.

The essence of Satan's accusations seems to be an anti-Establishment attitude which is much more popular today than it was in Chesterton's times:

You are the people in power! You are the police—the great fat, smiling men in blue and buttons! You are the Law… The only crime of the Government is that it governs. The unpardonable sin of supreme power is that it is supreme. I do not curse you for being cruel. I do not curse you (though I might) for being kind. I curse you for being safe!

This supremely anarchist attitude is pervaded by hatred which may be its root ("I would destroy the world if I could").

Syme springs to the defence of man. He has received sudden illumination. What is, he asserts, has been created in justice. Each thing on the earth has to war against each other thing and against the whole universe, alone, so that each thing that obeys law may have "the glory and isolation of the anarchist". Objectively, the universe is a benevolent conspiracy, but to a subjective view it presents a frightening exterior. The individual feels isolated, he fears and suffers, because all this is essential in gaining the glory, or the dignity of man through self-reliance and courage.

This is how Syme defends man and the meaning of the world. But at the same time he realizes that Sunday, hidden behind the scenes and knowing the dual nature of existence, may not have suffered as all others had done.

He asks "in a dreadful voice", his final question in the process of detecting who and what Sunday is: "Have you ever suffered?"

Then, again, a transformation of the nightmare world takes place. Sunday's face grows "to an awful size", "filling the whole sky", and disappears in blackness. From behind Nature, which has disappeared "a distant voice saying a commonplace text" is heard: "Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?"

The text is Christ's words from St Mark's gospel. Like its paraphrase in St Matthew, it refers to suffering and death by crucifixion, as is obvious from the scene of Jesus' agony in the garden of Gethsemane, in which the cup is mentioned again.

Thus Syme's tremendous question is not answered by Nature, but by Christ who is, according to Christian faith, both God and a Man. And being, as a man, subject to all the conditions of Nature and the miseries of human social and political history, suffered like his creation, though sinless and blameless.

That this is the correct way of interpreting the final scene in the dream, has been confirmed by Chesterton when he said [in an interview quoted by Maise Word]:

There is a phrase used at the end, spoken by Sunday: "Can ye drink from the cup that I drink of?" which seems to mean that Sunday is God. That is the only serious note in the book, the face of Sunday changes, you tear off the mask of Nature and you find God.

What follows in the story is Syme's awakening and meeting Gregory's graceful sister cutting lilac before breakfast in her garden. This is a simple closing part of a frame-story which has no special significance, so we may leave it and return to the dream-vision.

HOW THE UNITY OF COMPOSITION WAS ACHIEVED

It is not made of such stuff as dreams are made of, but rather of many materials such as Chesterton's experience of London life in the beginning of the twentieth century and of at least one visit to France; his walking discussions with Edmund C. Bentley; their fears of political and antitheistic Anarchism; their doubts about the sense and justice of the universe; The Book of Genesis, The Book of Job, and the Gospels; and some minor literary echoes, including, which is significant, Alice in Wonderland and allegorical dream-visions of English religious literature.

If we ask how from this hotchpotch any literary composition could be made, the answer is to be found in Chesterton's Autobiography:

I… was oppressed with the metaphysical nightmare of negations about mind and matter, with the morbid imagery of evil, with the burden of my own mysterious brain and body; but by this time I was in revolt against them; and trying to construct a healthier conception of cosmic life, even if it were one that should err on the side of health. I even called myself an optimist, because I was so horribly near to being a pessimist…All this part of the process was afterwards thrown up in the very formless form of a piece of fiction called The Man Who Was Thursday.

The urge to overcome late Victorian pessimism found its springboard for telling a story in the idea of investigating the mystery of existence and in Chesterton's mind this investigation meant a story of detection without crime. He has stated this in the following passage [of the interview quoted by Ward]:

In an ordinary detective tale the investigator discovers that some amiable-looking fellow who subscribes to all the charities, and is fond of animals, has murdered his grandmother, or is a trigamist. I thought it would be fun to make the tearing away of menacing masks reveal benevolence.

Intended as a story of detection, The Man Who Was Thursday began, like Conrad's The Secret Agent, as a novel (or a burlesque of it) of political crime, in which the investigation was to be conducted by a growing number of secret policemen. This literary form it preserves until the moment when only Sunday is left as an embodied mystery of conspiracy. His escape and the chase after him as a man develop into a riotous carnival which ends with his flight in a balloon. Then, in the natural (instead of the social) setting the detectives change into philosophers, because they are members of "a special corps of… policemen who are also philosophers", but the detection still goes on. Sunday's behaviour also changes, but the investigation of Sunday's character and the nature of the world continues.

With the change of the men's dirty and tattered clothes for the gorgeous robes of the Seven Days or Sons of God the search for the truth behind Sunday leaves general philosophical grounds and moves towards theology or Christian philosophy, because only a philosophy based on the assumption that God has become a man can make its arguments valid. Now the predicament of man is a moral and religious problem and Gregory becomes Satan who is the Archanarchist and the Accuser of men and God. The voice of Christ solves the mystery of suffering in human existence, but only for those who accept the Christian conception of God-Man and his fellowship with men in suffering and glory. That is why Chesterton shifts from philosophy to theology.

Here the investigation ends, because the mystery has been partly detected and partly revealed.

Chesterton has called the process of detection of the nonexistent, but strongly suspected cosmic crime "the groping and guesswork philosophy of the story". And, appropriately, the story assumed the form of a nightmare with the characteristic gradual transformation of the initial presented world into a series of differing succeeding worlds. But two constant factors make it a consistent and a valid book. One of them is the process of detection as the principle organizing its plot from the beginning to the end. The other is the fact that this detective "groping and guesswork" is a "philosophy".

To put in other words, The Man Who Was Thursday is a novel of ideas—a clash of two opposing philosophies of life: Anarchic Nihilism, which wishes to destroy everything, and Christianity which wants to fight evil, and thus to preserve creation.

The author of the book did not start from a previously assumed philosophical position. That is why the novel is not a mere illustration of a ready-made thesis, but a real debate, just like some other novels of ideas written at the beginning of the twentieth century by H. G. Wells and A. Huxley. But at the same time it is a mystery novel with a deepening mystery and therefore one in which simple police detection must give place to other kinds of investigation. As a novel of ideas and a mystery novel it is distinctly Chestertonian. It operates with allegory and symbol and combines detection with philosophy. This combination was further developed in the detective stories of Father Brown. It is unique or rare in presenting a successful detection without crime.