Mystery Formula: The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

Mystery Formula: The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

The Big Sleep is a mystery-genre novel because it has literary formulas of mystery in it. The formulas of mystery genre are character, detective, villain, setting, female betrayer, criminal, and confrontation.

The first thing I would analyze is setting. There are 3 steps I would do for analyzing the setting. Those are locate the main setting, evaluate the mood, and assess the atmosphere. For the first step, I found that The Big Sleep takes place in a big city in America during the 1930s. The second step, I felt that the writer wanted to represent weather as human emotion. There are a lot of bad events in the story and those are when rain is mostly happened. When the main character, Philip Marlowe, finds answers from so many questions that are in his head, the weather would be very nice, the sun is shining brightly. The last step is asses the atmosphere. The 1930s is the period of America’s Great Depression. The setting when people are hungry for money sets the stage for conflicts and resolution in the story of The Big Sleep.

The formula which stood out in mystery novel is the detective. Detective in The Big Sleep novel is Philip Marlowe. He is a private detective though he used to work as an investigator for Mr. Wilde, the District Attorney. I could tell from the story that Mr. Marlowe is a hard-worker and truth-seeker. Because despite of the fact that he only earns twenty five dollars a day from his job, which is not much, he is still looking for more facts about Rusty Regan, when he doesn’t even paid for it, so it is just out of his curiosity, a real truth-seeker.

The confrontation of The Big Sleep novel starts when General Sternwood hires Philip Marlowe to solve the blackmail against his daughter, Carmen Sternwood, from a guy named Arthur Gwynn Geiger. Geiger blackmail Carmen because he has naked photo of her. General Sternwood as her father always solves his daughter’s problems with money before. But now, he hires Marlowe.

Side characters in The Big Sleep novel are General Sternwood who hires Marlowe, Mona Mars who is related to Rusty Regan’s case, Chief Inspector Bernie Ohls who is a friend of Marlowe, Agnes Lowzier who works in Geiger’s bookstore, Dorothy Malone who is briefly appeared as Acme book shop proprietress, Harry Jones who is appeared briefly, and Norris who is the butler in General Sternwood’s place.

The other main character of a story is no else than the villain himself. The villain of The Big Sleep novel is Eddie Mars. Because he is indirectly behind almost every murder in this novel. Eddie Mars is a racketeer, a gambler, and a bad guy. Marlowe describes him in a passage, "You think he's just a gambler. I think he's a pornographer, a blackmailer, a hot car broker, a killer by remote control, and a suborner of crooked cops. He's whatever looks good to him…he never killed anybody, he just hires it done."

The criminal in this novel is mostly them who do the “dirty” job for Eddie Mars. They are A. G. Geiger who blackmail General Sternwood, Owen Taylor who killed Geiger, Joe Brody who is having the naked photo of Carmen Sternwood, Carol Lundgren who killed Joe Brody, Lash Canino who is a killer, Art Huck who is a crime partner, Carmen Sternwood who killed Rusty Regan, and Vivian Rutledge who hide the dead body of Rusty Regan.

Author:

Arum Ratnaning Ratri

2211416050

English Literature 2016

Universitas Negeri Semarang

For subject:

Popular Literature and Film (503)