The Image of Monotony
One of the goodbyes that is considered in the novel is the private detective game. With actual murder mystery solving taking a back seat in this entry in the saga of Philip Marlowe, the narrative affords the author a chance to delve more deeply into other aspects of his character. One of those aspects is aging, frustration and the consequences of daily exposure to the low-life of humanity. Marlowe gives an overview of an ordinary day in his line of work and then is moved to philosophical musing:
“What makes a man stay with it nobody knows. You don't get rich, you don't often have much fun. Sometimes you get beaten up or shot at or tossed into the jailhouse. Once in a long while you get dead. Every other month you decide to give it up and find some sensible occupation while you can still walk without shaking your head. Then the door buzzer rings and you open the inner door to the waiting room and there stands a new face with a new problem, a new load of grief, and a small piece of money.”
The Image of Integrity
Marlowe is fond of showing some people the totem of his code of honor and righteous decency. The literal imagery of this icon of integrity is James Madison, Father of the Bill of Rights and fourth President of the United States. But it is the metaphorical imagery that is of greater import. The imagery here is the now-defunct five-thousand-dollar bill. At the time it was still in circulation, a very rich client paid Marlowe for services rendered. Marlowe’s famously stubborn sense of rectitude is perhaps nowhere more perfectly captured than in the imagery of the riches he keeps locked in a safe about which he swears:
“I'll never spend a nickel of it. Because there was something wrong with the way I got it. I played with it a little at first and I still get it out once in a while and look at it. But that's all-not a dime of spending money."
The Image of the Law
The image of what the law in America really is does not arrive courtesy of Marlowe nor a criminal nor one of the many rich and powerful manipulative businessmen he routinely comes across nor even a cop. Appropriately, it is a lawyer who provides the narrative’s overarching lasting image of what the law is and is not in America. Not that someone like Marlowe would ever agree:
“The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.”
The Existential Image
The Long Goodbye is far less a mystery in the sense of a body being killed than it is about the murder of a soul. Marlowe descends so deeply into the corruption of the soul of America that ultimately solving his case becomes an afterthought. The threat in this story is not from violence, but corruption of that soul and the existential threat that everything will be revealed as empty and devoice of meaning. That frightening potential becomes the final bit of imagery expressed in the novel in the form of the closing words of the inscrutable Mr. Lennox:
“An act is all there is. There isn't anything else. In here," he tapped his chest with the lighter-"there isn't anything. I've had it, Marlowe. I had it long ago. Well, I guess that winds things up."
