Publisher's Synopsis
In The Big Sleep every death is a soldier's death: abrupt, and brutal, and often unjust. Even the quiet passing that Marlowe struggles to enable for his client, the "old and obviously dying" General, will be, naturally enough, a soldier's death. The Big Sleep is Chandler's meta-textual rumination on war, The Great War--Chandler's War.
And it's more, even, than that. As did his beloved Shakespeare, Chandler wrote for all readers-casual and academic, groundlings and intelligentsia, dabbler and devoted-and what he wrote is a text as densely-packed as any in American literature before Nabokov and Pynchon: the detective story is just the disguise it wears. The Allegorical Big Sleep strips away the novel's surface, revealing the hidden text behind the detective story, and the source, and meaning, of Chandler's fictional characters. The Allegorical Big Sleep belongs on every university's reading list. Without wasting words, with only a dollop of the usual psychologizing and redundant biographical details that pad out similar work, this essay represents a seismic shift in Chandler criticism. If you are familiar with The Big Sleep, you may think you know what's going on-but you don't.
