The Long Goodbye Stylistic Analysis

A novel is a tool employed by the author to explore and teach the reader about certain subjects. Differences between the intended topics of indirect discussion inform the tone, atmosphere, content, and characters of the novel. Thus, novels that discuss coming of age have very different settings and subjects that novels that want to discuss war and violence. Even within the same genre, the author’s chosen topics of discussion dictate differences between characters, style, and setting. Noir is one of the best genres to observe these shifts in because it is characterized by a certain style and character design so that any deviation from the norm is glaring. This essay will be discussing the difference in topic between two novels by two very different

Philip Marlowe, his detective, is the archetypal protagonist of the genre. This essay will be dealing with his book The Long Goodbye. The book was published in 1953 and deals with that time period. The book’s main topics of discussion are the corruption of law enforcement and rich, the dangerous and jealous nature of love, and the impossibility of maintaining and enforcing justice in an unjust society and world. Walter Mosley, on the other hand, writes from the future about the past, as his novel Black Betty--the novel that this essay will be dealing with--was published in 1994 but is set in 1961. The book is concerned with the African-American community of 1960s Los Angeles, and its topics reflect that shift in demographic. Like The Long Goodbye, this book deals with the corruption of the police, but it also delves into the prevalence of violence in the African-American community, the injustice facing African-Americans during the 1960s, and the struggle of one man to distance himself from that violence. Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins is Mosley’s detective, and differs from Marlowe substantially, making him barely classifiable as a Noir Detective. He remains in the genre because his world shares many characteristics with