The Big Sleep

Despite the complicated and sometimes confusing plot, the heart of “The Big Sleesp” is not the solution of the murders--the whodunit--but rather the world the story depicts and the movement of Marlowe within that world. Chandler's characters repeatedly comment on the corruption of Los Angeles and the modern world in general. The novel depicts a city in which pornographers and gamblers operate under the protection crooked policemen, young women use their sexuality to ruin men, …

…man didn't have to be." In a way, “The Big Sleep” functions as a bildungsroman: Marlowe learns about the moral illness of the modern world and his own inability to function within it. He begins the story with his knightly code; it is tested and it fails. His final statements are bitter and desperate--the struggles of a man who has lost his sense of moral order and is reaching out for a source of support.