The Simplicity of The Big Sleep by Raymond ChandlerRaymond 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 guys" or "bad guys" with no deeper meaning or symbolism. 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 &emdash; the chessboard. Marlowe played it every chance he got, and it probably helped him think about the next step in a particular case. I found it strange that Chandler made such a brief mention of chess, but I didn't understand why until I finished the book and had time to think about what I had 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 of chess is to take possession of the king, the underlying strategy is to eliminate as many pieces as possible. This serves as assurance in the overall goal. Since the characters/pieces determine the direction of the goal, let's look at them to start. I chose to examine two characters in depth and then put them on the board with the rest of the characters in the novel. Philip Marlowe does not fit the knight of the chessboard. Chandler assumes that the reader will fall into the easy trap of assigning Marlowe the role of the knight. After all, he is the main man in the novel, the one who must solve the case. His self-description in the first chapter tricks the reader into believing that he is a typical White Knight hero. "I was neat, clean, shaven, and sober, and it didn't matter who knew it. I was everything a well-dressed private detective should be" (3). This is an apt description of a knight only because knights must possess similar qualities to be heroes..