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

the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights."

By that point in the novel, perhaps it wasn't a game for nights, but it started as one. One of the first things Marlowe notices as he arrives at the Sternwood residence is "a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. [Unlike Carmen, it seems] The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots of the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and though that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn't seem to be really trying." Marlowe, on the other hand, would make the effort. When he returns to the mansion, he makes a point of noticing it again: "The main hallway looked just the same. The portrait over the mantel had the same hot black eyes and the knight in the stained glass window still wasn't getting anywhere untying the naked damsel from the tree." Unlike Marlowe, who by this point is on the verge of solving the mystery.

Chandler is identifying Marlowe with an old chivalric code - a code that lies at the heart of his motivation to see the right thing done. Chandler was originally even going to give the character the name Mallory - the author of the most famous knights' chronicle - Morte D'Arthur. Other nods to the knights of old can be found in the other Marlowe novels. One (and a short story that influenced it) has the title The Lady in the Lake; in The High Window, Marlowe is a "shop- soiled Galahad"; and characters in his books bear allusive names such as Grayle, Kingsley, and Quest.

Indeed, the detective's journey in The Big Sleep is a quest for the Holy Grail not only the truth, but some semblance of justice and honour. In that respect, Marlowe is far from entirely successful. He begins the novel with his knightly code, it is tested, and though he retains some of his honour, he comes to realise that such a code is out of kilter with the moral degradation of the world in which he lives. By the end he may have got certain people out of trouble, and saved the feelings of the General, but there is a barb to it: "I do all this," he tells Vivian, "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." Marlowe is left bitter, alienated, and in trepidation about what the world will throw at him next. He will take his chances with Eddie Mars, but "Outside the bright gardens had a haunted look, as though small wild eyes were watching me from behind the bushes, as though the sunshine itself had a mysterious something in its light... I was part of the nastiness now."

With the respect to Marlowe's character journey, Ray Newman has identified The Big Sleep as possessing elements of a 'Bildungsroman'. The term applies to novels of 'education', in which a well-meaning, but innocent and inexperienced character sets out with either no end in mind or the wrong one, and through a series of false starts and mistakes he reaches maturity and finds his proper profession. Newman writes that, "In each of the novels... stasis manifests itself in a... cycle of futile action, as Marlowe struggles with arbitrarily designed mysteries, never quite finding his solution."

However, a Bildungsroman interpretation fails to take into account that Marlowe is clearly no innocent as he steps through the doors of the Sternwood mansion: we are given evidence throughout that he already knows all about how the seedy world functions. His optimism and knightly code peaks and troughs, and despite his statement that "it wasn't a game for knights"; he never fully abandons his idea of honour in service of his temporary 'King' General Sternwood. Marlowe says to him: "You don't know what I have to go through or over or under to do your job for you. I do it my way. I do my best to protect you and I may break a few rules, but I break them in your favour. The client comes first, unless he's crooked. Even then all I do is hand the job back to him and keep my mouth shut." Whilst Marlowe was part of the nastiness, "the old man didn't have to be."

Though Marlowe has a mysterious past and little in the way of 'backstory', the character had been gestating under various names, but always in the first-person through many of Chandler's short stories (see Further