The Big Sleep | Characters
With The Big Sleep, Chandler inaugurated a series of novels in which the central character and narrator is Philip Marlowe, a private investigator working in Los Angeles. Marlowe is the moral center of all of Chandler's novels; it is through his perceptions and comments that judgments about the other characters are formed. Marlowe is the epitome of the tough but sensitive private eye, maintaining the requisite balance of cynicism and idealism in order to cope with his world. Marlowe's obvious romanticism has led some critics to cast him in the archetypal role of a knight errant in...
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