The Use of Series in The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

The Use of Series in The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

In The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler writes items in a series in almost every paragraph that does not include dialogue, occasions, in the text where Marlowe watches the other character do something like open and close a book or light a cigarette and flick the ash into a tray. When Chandler stops the dialogue to creates a space for Marlowe to record elements in the environment, he constructs sentences that indicate how Marlowe assimilates the information: characters perform three or more acts successively and Marlowe notices every movement, recording it at once. Therefore, Chandler builds sentences that contain as many separate actions as possible to reflect how fast the character performs the act, rather than isolate single actions in single sentences that break the action up. Specifically, Chandler builds sentences with items in a series to reflect continuous motion and mimic the way Marlowe perceives it. Series are economical and fast, pointing to the movement of the character and the way Marlowe thinks.

The series occur in paragraphs Marlowe narrates, sections before or after dialogue when Marlowe establishes the scope of the scene or moves the scene along. Chandler uses the construction when he describes the principal action in a scene. For example, chapter 17 opens with a paragraph that includes this sentence: "The boy swung the car over to the box hedge in front of Geiger's house, killed the motor and sat looking straight before him with both hands on the wheel" (99). In the paragraph, Chandler describes the inert environment with one compound sentence and two simple sentences. None of them contain a series. The sentence that ...

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...es the scene correctly and as quickly as Marlowe sees it.

Chandler does not want to write a text that reminds the reader it is a text. Instead he wants to imitate reality. He wants the reader to follow Marlowe, look over his shoulder, and maintain a constant, attached point-of-view shot of the action. For this reason, Chandler uses series to simulate the rhythm and speed of real action. When a writer like Chandler omits words and replaces them with commas, "ands," and "ors," he makes the sentence concise and speedy. When one reads such a text, she understands two things about the scene: how the character moves and how Marlowe perceives the movement. Chandler is sensitive to the relationship between the text, the reader, reality. So he creates a text that mimics real movement and real thinking. He uses series to carry the reader through the text.