Chapter Unequal and Opposite of The Big Sleep - Study Guide by Raymond Chandler

means we are with him in every waking minute, is the biggest barrier to finding out the truth of Marlowe - his tight-lipped nature means that he isn't inclined to spill the beans on regard to superfluous stories about his past.

Whenever he meets with Vivian, Marlowe is tight-lipped. "You're not much of a gusher, are you, Mr Marlowe?" she says. He certainly doesn't want to give away anything that might compromise the case he is working on, but there is also the impression that he doesn't want to give away anything about who he is. He won't even reveal his real name to Carmen, instead introducing himself as 'Doghouse Reilly' - a pretence he even attempt to maintain. However, when at one point he is explaining the current situation to the General, Sternwood says to him, "You talk too damn much, Marlowe." It is to men that Marlowe is inclined to impart the most information. He trusts men in a way that he doesn't trust women. In fact, lack of trust for women is putting it mildly. After his encounters with Vivian and then Carmen in the same night, "I got up feeling sluggish and tired... with a dark harsh taste of Sternwoods still in my mouth. I was as empty of life as a scarecrow's pockets... You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women. Women made me sick." And he has few qualms about slapping them around a bit if they won't co-operate. Chandler even makes Carmen seem to enjoy it a little: "The giggles stopped dead, but she didn't mind the slap any more than last night. Probably all her boyfriends got around to slapping her sooner or later. I could understand how they might."

However, it is 1939, and in comparison to the average late '30s male, Marlowe is no doubt a positive gentleman. It is the encounter with Carmen in his apartment that reveals perhaps the most about Marlowe and his relationship with women, and indeed other people, and the way he perceives himself. He fails to take Carmen's bate of "I'm all undressed," and replies with "I always wear my rubbers in bed myself, in case I wake up with a bad conscience and have to sneak away from it." Then she pulls back the covers - "She lay there on the bed in the lamplight, as naked and glistening as a pearl. The Sternwood girls were giving me both barrels that night." But, he's not going for it: "I appreciate all your offering me. It's just more than I could possibly take. Doghouse Reilly never let a pal down that way. I'm your friend. I won't let you down - in spite of yourself. You and I have to keep on being friends, and this isn't the way to do it. Now will you dress like a nice little girl... It's a question of professional pride. You know - professional pride. I'm working for your father. He's a sick man, very frail, very helpless. He sort of trusts me not to pull any stunts." And when he kisses Vivian, he has the decency - or perhaps just plain common sense - not to go any further: "Kissing you is nice, but your father didn't hire me to sleep with you... Don't think I'm an icicle... I'm not blind or without sense. I have warm blood like the next guy. You're easy to take - too damned easy."

"You son of a bitch," is the response he gets from Vivian, and when Marlowe's rejects Carmen, "she called me a filthy name." "I didn't mind that," Marlowe tells us. "I didn't mind what she called me, what anybody called me. But this was the room I had to live in. It was all I had in the way of a home. In it was everything that was mine, that had any association for me, any past, anything that took the place of a family. Not much; a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that. Nothing. Such as they were they had all my memories. I couldn't stand her in that room any longer. What she called me only reminded me of that."

It is a one of the only places in the novel where we are allowed a glimpse of Marlowe's past - or at least a glimpse that he has a past. Whatever situations he gets into, he is fiercely protective of his identity and emotional space. But this is not to say that he is immune to these women, and his reaction when Carmen finally leaves his apartment is a rare glimpse of Marlowe's human frailty: "I went back to the bed and looked down at it. The imprint of her head was still in the pillow, of her small corrupt body still on the sheets. I put my empty glass down and tore the bed to pieces savagely."

There is another crucial reference in the scene with Carmen in the apartment - the allusion to a chess game: "I went... across the room again to the chessboard on a card table under the lamp. There was a problem laid out on the board, a six-mover. I couldn't solve it, like a lot of my problems. I reached down and moved a knight..." However, pretty soon, as Carmen continues to refuse to leave, "I looked down at