Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer

Syme is trapped in this nightmare, where nothing is what it seems. The book is like a nightmare in so many ways, except when the unexpected does strike; it takes a turn for the better. All assumed foes are in fact friends. “As a man in an evil dream strains himself to scream and wake, Syme strove with a sudden effort to fling off this last and worse of his fancies.” (Pg 46) I believe The Man Who Was Thursday is what the subtitle suggests, a nightmare. Syme struggles with his loneliness and his mind plays tricks on him as if in a bad dream. Whether dreams have meaning, that’s a personal opinion, but this nightmare certainly carries something that can be applied universally. What is psychologically thrilling about Chesterton’s book is that there is no escaping the order and hidden patterns. In the end Chesterton shows order and purpose as something that is valued, but I find the way in which he writes it to be suffocating. The book invokes a claustrophobic sensation because there is no escaping the inevitable structure of the book. When Sunday announces that he was the one that recruited all of his own council members as police, it illustrates an ultimate power and everyone else was just a puppet in a show. To me this made the council’s whole struggle futile. The only enemies they had were themselves.