Use of Metaphor in The Big Sleep :: sleep

Use of Metaphor in The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler wrote The Big Sleep as a piece of hard boiled detective fiction. This style was a reaction to the high style of detective stories such as those involving Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple. Writers often set hard boiled detective novels in a gritty world where everyone has a past. In The Big Sleep, Chandler keeps this edgy, lower class tone right down to the objects he utilizes for comparisons in his metaphors. Chandler is highly precise in his word choice and diction. Through his language his is able to craft a world that I as the reader am able to visualize. When I see this world, I see a black and white world filled with real characters who live life on the mean side of the streets. When I first read The Big Sleep as a reader who pays little attention to style, I was practically unaware of Chandler's precision in creating this mental image for his reader. However upon a second read, I began to notice that the reason I was able to have such a vivid mental image of this hard edged world is that Chandler's detail and imagery maintains this picture right down to his metaphors. Part of the attempt of hard boiled detective novels is to be more realistic partly in response to the audience the fiction was being written for which was a more working class audience that read magazines in which these writers often published this fiction. So, Chandler to be true to both his audience and the genre utilizes commonplace objects in his metaphors. This can be seen in metaphors such as "like the buzzing of bees" (218) which is not only a sound which any audience would most likely be familiar with but also a rather plain description utilized to create the metaphor unlike one that might be placed in a romantic poem for instance. Some of the other commonplace metaphors that Chandler use include: "like a window-dresser getting the effect of a new twist of a scarf around a dummy's neck" (225), "as if I was some kind of strange beast escaped from a traveling circus" (207), "like light filtered through an aquarium tank"(8), "like wildflowers fighting for life on a b are rock"(7), "like a fresh fall of snow at Lake Arrowhead" (17) "like a puppy at the fringe of a rug"(20), "like a footbridge over a gully" (33).