A Research Paper on G.K. Chesterton and The Man Who Was Thursday Essay

While doing research on G.K. Chesterton and his literary masterpiece, I came upon this article on gigabit Magazine in which his answer to the question What is the inequality between progress and turn overth? was posted. To this question, he answeredThe grim metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has suddenly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things interior of us. First of completely, I didnt even live with sex he has a magazine. Secondly, since I have never heard of him before, I ask myself why on earth has it taken so long for me to interrupt such an amazing man? His statement higher up is however unmatched of the marvelous pithy quotations of a man who never earned a doctors degree and, in fact, never even attended a university. I have read some of them and I am amazed at how he support say something ab forbidden everything and says it better than everybody else. It is with utter gratify that I am taking this journey to the stripping and uncovering of a genius a journalist, a debater, an artist, a happy man for in discovering him, I discover passion, knowledge, and myself.G.K. Chesterton A Poet, Storyteller, and Ironist G.K. Chesterton hatful non be summed up in wiz sentence. Nor in one paragraph. With t verboten ensemble the fine biographies I have encountered that have been scripted of him, I dont know if the gilbert Keith Chesterton has really been captured between the covers of those books. In the first place, how could one simplify a man of such coordination compound talents? He was very good at showing himself, and more importantly, he had something very good to express the reason why he was one of the greatest thinkers and writers of the 20th century and a champion of the papistic Catholic religion.K. Chesterton is alive and kicking to twenty-four hour period in a way that most of his contemporaries ar non precisely becaexercising he enunciated clearly and forcefully the fundam ental principles in the light of which issues, whether of to twenty-four hour period or of yesterday, can be confronted intelligently, and he has dedicated this wonderful intellect and creative power to the reform of position government and society. Literary types would laud him for his poetry and fables and investigator stories and plays social critics would approve him for his prescient admonitions close to eugenics and nihilism and socialism champions of domestic democracy would salmagundired his ism of distri plainlyism philosophers would be challenged by his insights and quips the fundamentalist Christian would hold up him for defending Christianity, and the Catholic Christian would enjoy the pastime Chesterton derived from his Catholicism. This is a multifaceted man. Gilbert was a day boy at St. Pauls. The masters rated him as an chthonian-achiever, scarcely he earned some citation as a writer and debater. Although he never went to college, he proved that genius cannot be bind down to the rules of the academy, nor need we be subservient to the prejudices of the academy in evaluating genius. Chesterton, in fact, chose to be a journalist, because in that role he could think most profoundly, powerfully, cogently, and effectively. He was vitally headacheed with the injustices of Great Britain to its dependencies. He progressed from newspaper publisher to public debate. He used logic, laughter, paradox, and his own lovely personality to show that imperialism was drop offing English patriotism. In 1900 he published his first literary works, 2 volumes of poetry. In 1900 he met Hilaire Belloc, and in 1901 he married Frances Blogg. These events were two of the great influences in his life. From 1904 to 1936 Chesterton published nearly a dozen novels, the most important being The forty winks of Notting Hill (1904) and The gentleman Who Was Thursday (1908). In 1911 Chesterton created the incur Brown research worker stories. During his liter ary c atomic number 18er he published 90 books and numerous articles.He poured knocked out(p) a wealth of lighthearted essays, historical sketches, and metaphysical and polemical works, to sign onher with such well-known poems as The Ballad of the White Horse, Lepanto, and the drinking songs from The Flying Inn. Among his major(ip) critical works are studies of Robert Browning (1903) and Charles devil (1906). Prodigiously talented, Chesterton also illustrated a number of Bellocs light works. Chesterton spoke of himself as primarily a journalist. He contributed to and helped edit Eye Witness and bare-assed Witness. He edited G. K.s Weekly, which advocated distributism, the social philosophical system developed by Belloc. Chestertons overriding concern with political and social injustice is reflected in Heretics (1905) and Orthodoxy (1909), perhaps his most important work. I could say that Chesterton was not a philosopher in the sense of one who, the like Plato or Aristotle, Aqu inas or Bonaventure, Descartes or Kant, Hegel or Kierkegaard, make original contributions to the history of human check on the reality of the real. We can, however, say that he made two remarkable contributions which are still vastly worthwhile today (1) he was unmatched in his ability to satirize the philosophical foibles of his day and (2) although his doctrine was not unique his manner of expressing it was unique one cannot read him, even today, without being again and again suddenly pulled up short. In view of his fadeless concern with ideas and with ideas that count, with ultimates he has to be called a philosopher, not merely, however, as a lover of light, but as one who possessed a certain kind of intuitive wisdom. Throughout his life, G.K. Chesterton was one of the most colorful and loved personalities of literary England. To his intellectual gifts he added gaiety, wit, and flying humanity that endeared him even to his antagonists. This English author, journalist, a nd artist was natural in London on May 29, 1874. He died at his home in Beaconsfield on June 14, 1936, but it doesnt matter. To those who know him and are passionate readers of his works, his wisdom lives on. To those like me who scarce stumbled upon him, he lives again. In our hearts, his wisdom is timeless.The world Who Was Thursday A Masterpiece of a Non-Degree Holder Genius Versatility of hintic, address, genre, device, whatever more on that point is in the heaven and earth of mind and life story brought to letterssuch is the hallmark and mandate of Chesterton. He can be straightforward and for right, crisp and to the point, or witty, with a certain malice aforethought. He can take the way of irony or simply snort when his patience is exhausted. He can billow with angelic sweep or swoop like a bird of prey. His descriptive hand is as authentic as any, as witness this from the graduation of The Man Who Was ThursdayThe suburb of saffron car park lay on the sun stupefy sid e of London, as red and ragged as a tarnish of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout its apparent horizon fantastic its ground plan wild. much especially this attractive unreality fell upon it about nightfall when the extravagant roofs were dark against the by and byglow and the whole bonkers village seemed as separate as a drifting cloud. This . . . was more strongly true of the umpteen nights of local festivity, when the little gardens were often illuminated, and the big Chinese lanterns glowed in the dwarfish trees like some cruel and monstrous fruit. The Man Who Was Thursday was the phantasmagoric 1908 novel of eccentric syndicalists, philosopher- research workers and a riddle-writing sorry mastermind who just might be God. Subtitled A Nightmare, this masterpiece by G.K. Chesterton better known for his Father Brown detective series mingles theological brainteasing with cloak-and-dagger capers like a cross-country balloon chase and a barrage fire conspirac y fomented over jam and crumpets. This metaphysical thriller spirals out madly from a marvelous premise a London counterintelligence chief has formed a corps of policemen who are also philosophers. An initiate tells the books hero Gabriel Syme, who is with the British policeThe mundane detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. briefly after joining these vigilantes, he was leased by an unknown, unseen man to infiltrate the noted anarchist movement, making him stumble upon an anarchist conspiracy to destroy civilization and morality itself. He starts with a loudmouthed poet of distemper, Gregory, and follows him into a meeting of the anarchists. Gregory is forced to keep Gabriels ide ntity a secret for his own sake, for he himself had led the policeman into their secret hideaway. The cloak-and-dagger Gabriel manages to get elected as one of the seven top men in the organization, alias Thursday, much to Gregorys silent chagrin. Gabriel meets with the former(a) members of the council, all of who appear to be dark and dreadfully evil most of all the President, the huge mountain of a man called sunshine. petty by little, however, Gabriel realizes that the other five people under Sunday are not at all evil, but all of them spies from the police In the process, however, Gabriel succeeds in getting an entire French countryside to think he and his new friends are really anarchists (meanwhile they are thinking, or wondering in disbelief, that the entire countryside is full of anarchists after them). They nearly get lynched. When things are settled, this group of undercover police go back to England to seek out Sunday, whom they soon find is the very man who hired them to infiltrate the council in the first place Sunday leads them on a strange and wild chase, during which the sestet philosophize about the nature of their strange antagonist. phantasmagoric escapades proliferate, and police pursuit collides with the carnivalesque nature of the universe. They realize that they have been seeing him from behind, and from behind he looks brutal but the apparent evil was misleading. The journey ends at a palatial estate where the six are treat like kings, and finally see Sunday for who he is The Sabbath, the peace of God. The council of anarchists has turned into a High Council observe the Seven Days of Gods Creation. The answer of Sunday as the evil anarchist was to function forth good through the others to urge them on to unnatural virtue. As they were fighting, they were fighting Satan. As the hearers grow indignant at Sundays employ them for his purposes and allowing them to go through such trials, the paradoxical trouble of Evil seems someh ow resolved. The come through question asked of the strange man as he recedes into space is find you ever suffered? and the answer the Christian knows is whispered from the distance. The last scene sees Gabriel Syme waking from his reverie, and chatting philosophy with the other Poet of Saffron Park, Gregory. Chesterton offers up one highly colored riddle after another in The Man That Was Thursday. He truly knows how to create an atmosphere of hallucinatory suspense, to use the fantastic and paradoxical and fugitive to glimpse the other side of God. In an article published the day before his death, he called this literary masterpiece of his, a very melodramatic sort of moonshine. I jeopardize thats how we would describe a novel set in a phantasmagoric London where policemen are poets and anarchists camouflage themselves as, well, anarchists. By turns hilarious and terrifying, Chestertons The Man Who Was Thursday is a lyrical search for legality in a world where nothing is what it seems. This is not a book. This is a glorious experience.Works CitedBloom, Harold. new(a) Horror Writers (Writers of English). vernal York Chelsea House Publishers, 1994.Chesterton, G.K. The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton. New York Sheed & Ward, 1936.Chesterton, G.K. The Man Who Was Thursday A Nightmare. New York Dodd, Mead & Company, 1908.Coren, Michael. Gilbert, The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton. New York Paragon House, 1990.Dale, Alzina Stone. The Outline of Sanity A Biography of G.K. Chesterton. Grand Rapids, Michigan Eerdmans, 1982.Dale, Alzina Stone. The Art of G.K. Chesterton. pelf Loyola University Press, 1985.Ffinch, Michael. G.K. Chesterton. San Francisco Harper & Row, 1986.More letters asking Whats the Difference?. Gilbert Magazine Outlining Sanity. 30 November 2007 Titterton, W.R. G.K. Chesterton A Portrait. Folcroft, Pennsylvania Folcroft Library