And I want to thank you all for the exhaustive list of
authors for me to
pursue. I think I have enough to keep me busy for a few days
:).
Unfortunately, I'm not going to be able to pursue this for a
while, as grad
school applications loom...
I have an observation on Kimberly's post about Marlowe vs.
Spade. I don't
feel like I have enough experience to comment on Spade, but
Marlowe, that's
another story. I think that Chandler, being the intellectual
that he was,
gave Marlowe an Aristotelian sense of ethics. That is,
Marlowe belive that
people *should act* is a moral, upright fashion. Marlowe's
fatalism comes
from the fact that no one has any morals whatsoever in his
world. Thus he is
constantly betrayed by his clients, colleagues, and even his
friends because
they don't follow the same code as he. The thing that
fascinates me about
Marlowe is that he spends every one of his adventures looking
for someone like
him, with a higher sense of ethics, and he never finds it
(perhaps he finds it
for a while in the arms of a woman, but that rarely carries
on into the next
novel). He is one of the more powerfully tragic figures in
literature (to me,
at least), the only upright man in a distinctly crooked
world.
Sorry to ramble, I just get fired up about this... Hope this
helps you
understand in some way.
Roger
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