The Simplicity of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler would have us believe that The Big Sleep is just another example of hard-boiled detective fiction. He would like readers to see Philip Marlowe, Vivian Regan, Carmen Sternwood, Eddie Mars, and the rest of the characters as "good" or "bad" without any deeper meaning or symbolism to them. I found the book simple and easy to understand; the problem was that it was too easy, too simple. Then came a part that totally stood out from the rest of the book: the chessboard. Marlowe played with it every chance he got, and it probably helped him think about the next move in a particular case. I found it strange that Chandler mentioned chess so briefly, but I didn't understand why until I finished the book and had time to think about what I'd read. In a very interesting sense, the whole novel resembles the game of chess. Each character is a piece and the name of the game is survival. Although the ultimate goal in chess is to take possession of the king, the underlying strategy is to eliminate as many pieces as possible. This serves as insurance for the overall goal. Since the characters/pieces determine the direction of the objective, let's look at them to get started. I chose to delve into two characters and then put them on the board together with the rest of the characters in the novel. Philip Marlowe does not correspond to the knight on the chessboard. Chandler assumes that the reader will fall into the easy trap of casting Marlowe as the knight. After all, he is the main man of the novel, the one who must solve the case. His self-description in the opening chapter leads the reader to believe that he is a typical white knight hero. "I was neat, clean, clean-shaven, and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything a well-dressed private detective should be" (3). This is an appropriate description of a knight only because knights must possess similar qualities to be heroes.