Literary allusion in The Long Goodbye and A Wild Sheep Chase

In gratitude for a ride back to Hollywood, Philip Marlowe offers the poems of T. S. Eliot to Linda Loring’s driver Amos, to which he responds “he already had them” (237). Amos later recites lines from Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, a dramatic monologue in stream of consciousness, to Marlowe. Allusions to Eliot are both overt and implied in The Long Goodbye. Marlowe’s interiority is methodological in its narration of thoughts and events. While trying to glean the significance of Marlowe and Amos’ exchange, Eliot’s line “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons” recalled the intent focus in Chapter 5 on brewing coffee despite “a gun in the hand of a desperate character” (28). Like Prufrock, Marlowe elevates inconsequential happenings of his day-to-day. In Chapter 13 Marlowe conjures a hypothetical blonde who “speaks softly out of nowhere and you can’t lay a finger on her because in the first place you don’t want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original…” (90). He dismisses the intellectual and convivial capability within his invented trope of anemic blonde intellectuals, akin to Prufrock’s refrain “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.”

In A Wild Sheep Chase, a woman from the narrator’s college years is also characterized by a progression of books but boku does not disdain her for being well-read. Her choice of novels are contemporaneous with the setting, ranging from Beat poet Allen Ginsberg to Japanese writer Kenzaburō Ōe. Boku mentions reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes repeatedly, first after receiving instruction to locate the sheep and finally before the Sheep Man visits the house in the Hokkaido mountains. Sherlock Holmes is not mentioned again after their interaction; boku abandons the “ratiocination” of the book and his own quest. He later picks up a Joseph Conrad novel from the Rat’s room. Popular texts by Conrad like Heart of Darkness are thought to be intentionally ambiguous much like Murakami’s own writing. The reader’s expectation of a conventionally satisfying ending from A Wild Sheep Chase are subverted like Stefano Tani identifies in his definition of the postmodern anti-detective novel: “…the inanity of the discovery is brought to its climax in the nonsolution, which unmasks a propensity towards disorder and irrationality that has always been implicit within detective fiction” (46).

Bella Bennett