A Disillusioning Labyrinth

     The endings of neither The Long Goodbye nor A Wild Sheep Chase are satisfactory in a traditional sense. Both Marlowe and Boku's quests turned out to be rather pointless: no evil was punished, no justice was attained, no meaningful reward was given, and both were left alone by themselves with several unrepairable broken relationships. The characters in both books seemed trapped in a labyrinth, and after the readers think they've finally found a way out, it turns out that there is yet another layer of existential labyrinth out there with no escape.

    Throughout the book, the impression Marlowe gives me is that despite of his occasional reckless behavior, he is never disorientated and always in control of the situation, like the protagonist of a detective fiction is expected to be. He seems to have successfully disentangled himself from the crimes and complicated relationships among the Wades, Lorings, Potters and found justice for his friend until he realized that the friend he devoted so much for has emotionally betrayed him from the very beginning. Similarly, the impression Boku gives me is that he can usually examine situations quite objectively because he seems to be disinterested in human (and cat) emotions in general, which makes the final scene of him breaking down by the beach more striking. During his sheep chase, he seems to have spontaneously come across clues and decided to follow them to travel up the mountains and stayed there out of his free will, only in the end did he realize that his spontaneity is really part of an elaborate and incomprehensible set-up and has all been calculated.

    To me it feels like that both Marlowe and Boku are doomed from the beginning. Neither of them have personally done anything "wrong" to end up being trapped in the situation they found themselves in, yet they still each fall into an elaborate plan and end up being emotionally exhausted just because they are who they are and will make the choices they make. It's also interesting to note that both books have some sort of "evil" and powerful organization threatening to harm the protagonists, yet neither Marlowe nor Boku showed any desire to battle the "bad guys" and these deeper larger forces are not even too relevant to the endings of the stories.

    I'm wondering if this overarching sense of disillusionment is a reflection of the World Wars. The lives of every ordinary individual has been negatively affected by the war, and they can neither do anything to prevent it nor to combat the larger forces behind it.

Crystal