Chandler’s View of Chivalry in a Modern City
Wednesday, March 5th, 2003This essay was written during the second semester of my sophomore year at Johns Hopkins University for Hard Boiled Fiction and Film Noir with Dr. John Irwin.
Carlos Macasaet
Dr. John Irwin
220.399
5 March 2003
In The Big Sleep (1939), Raymond Chandler constantly compares the protagonist, Phillip Marlow, with a knight. We see this on the first page when Marlowe observes the stained glass window portraying a knight lackadaisically liberating a nude lady from the ropes that bind her. Marlowe comments that inevitably he will have to help the knight in the window to free the lady because the knight does not seem to be trying hard enough. However, Chandler makes it obvious that Marlowe is striving for an ideal that cannot exist in a modern world of corruption. How does Chandler define chivalry and the ideals of a romantic age in a modern-day Los Angeles that Phillip Marlowe fails to fit into?
