Big Sleep

Big Sleep

  • Submitted By: titliyan
  • Date Submitted: 03/08/2009 11:02 AM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 259
  • Page: 2
  • Views: 426

Jonathan Chatlani Stewart Cooke 603-102-04 / Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction and the Film Noir October 23, 2008 A Sleepless Soldier In the novel The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler depicts a world that is filled with a corrupt society in which young women use their charm to destroy men, gamblers and pornographers operate under the protection of corrupt policemen, and wealth can buy immunity from the law. It is a fallen world where glamorous appearances mask filthy deeds and in this world the character of Philip Marlowe is portrayed as a worn-out knight who must operate under this society. This is seen through the use of techniques as foreshadowing and symbolism. In the end, Marlowe realizes that in trying to follow his code he has only helped further deception: "I do all this," he tells Vivian Regan, "for twenty-five bucks a day, and maybe just a little to protect what little pride a broken and sick old man has left in his blood, in the thought that his blood is not poison, and that although his two little girls are a trifle wild, as many girls are these days, they are not perverts or killers" (175). Marlowe covers up Regan's murder, concluding that death cannot bother Regan now: "You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the way of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was. But the old man didn't have to be" (189).

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