Analysis of G. K. Chesterton’s short story «The Sign of the Broken Sword»

«The Sign of the Broken Sword» is a short story by G. K. Chesterton featuring his famous characters Father Brown and former criminal Flambeau. In the centre of a story is a mysterious death of General Sir Arthur St. Clare, who was hanged on a tree with his broken sword hung round his neck. It is a detective story and throughout it Father Brown reveals to us the mystery of General St. Clare.

The story starts with the description of landscape and the description of St. Clare’s monument, which is a sort of exposition, where the main hero of the story and the place where the story will begin (or, more accurately, one of the stories) are presented. Then two other characters, Father Brown and Flambeau (who are not presented properly because they are heroes of the cycle thus there is no need to introduce them in each story) appear and the plot starts with Father Brown’s question: “Where does a wise man hide a pebble?”. It is necessary to say that author turns to retrospective, thus creating a framed structure of the story - the priest and his companion are narrator and listener and from Father Brown’s lips we hear the true story of St. Clair’s crime. So, there are two settings also: the past and the present. In both stories the exposition is scattered: in modern times Father Brown mentions he «dug up in holes and corners» bits of evidence that helped him to solve the mystery while Flambeau remembers his past, and the story about general is more «chaotic» and it is not told in chronological order: the narrator often returns to preceding events, revealing the reasons why St. Clare did such a horrible thing, which is, though, typical for detective stories. As the first story develops with the priest telling about St. Clare, Olivier, and others, in the second one this is only an exposition, presenting characters. There is also a flash-forward when the priest tells Flambeau about Olivier, revealing some results of the battle. The plot in the second story starts only from the description of the day when Arthur killed Murray.

There are two conflicts in the story, one of which stretches from past to present, beginning with the revelation of Arthur’s treachery by Captain Keith to the same revelation by Father Brown. So it is possible to speak about two «climax points». The first conflict is an external one between General St. Clair and major Murray, which approaches its climax when Arthur kills Major and decides to conceal the murder by making his soldiers sacrifice themselves in an obviously . The second one is internal and concerns the man’s choice to either speak the truth or to be silent. The climax here is the execution of General St. Clare by his own men. The denouement of the external conflict is the obviously suicidal battle. The internal one finds the denouement in the remaining soldiers’ decision not to tell the truth to anybody «for the honour of England and of his [St. Clare’s] daughter» and is supplemented by Father Brown who says that he decided not to tell the truth either, but if any of the innocent people are wrongly blamed, he will reveal the truth.

It is peculiar that there is a lot of foreshadowing in this story. The examples are the Brown’s question what if somebody said that Hector from myths was treacherous and the Flambeau’s version of the story and the following priest’s answer that the truth is even more horrible. But the most important demonstration of it is the priest’s question: “Where does a wise man hide a pebble?” which is asked at the beginning and then repeated and expanded throughout the story up to its climax and each time the answer is more horrific. First there is only a hint when Father Brown says «Do you mean that when a wise man has to hide a real diamond he has been known to hide it among sham ones?». We have an answer now, but then the priest enlarges the question asking what if you need to hide a leaf but there is no forest and then answers that he has to grow one. This and the following remark such deed is «a fearful sin» helps quick-witted readers correlated with the remarks about treachery and things worse than madness and despair already guess what had happened.

There is symbolism in the story: it starts with a landscape which can be called gothic, which is compared to Scandinavian hell. Father Brown later mentions «Divine Comedy» by Dante, speaking about the ninth circle where traitors are suffering. And when the truth is revealed, the connection between those two moments is obvious: the monuments stands in «a hell of incalculable cold», as if it is a traitor in Dante’s Hell.

Road from the monument to the inn is an important symbol: it reflects travelling from ignorance to truth. From the top depicted in exposition, from the monument of a man who has been wrongly ennobled, the travelers go down, deeper into the dark forest of St. Clare’s sins, but, as truth reveals slowly, they begin going upwards, to the light.

Finally, the broken sword is a symbol. The story is called «The sign of the broken sword» and has double meaning. First is direct: at the end of the story Father Brown and Flambeau see the sign and the lettering, repeating the words. The second one is metaphorical, the word ‘sign’ meaning of ‘symbol’. In most stories the broken sword is a symbol of defeat, of treachery, and at the beginning, looking at the words on the flat side of the monument we can think that broken sword means treachery the victim of which was the General, but in the end we understand that there was treachery indeed, but it was St. Clare who proved himself a traitor. So, with the heroes, we travel from the broken sword, that is a symbol of a fallen hero to the sign of broken sword of a person, who killed innocent people to his own benefit.