Juliet's post

 

Hello! It’s Juliet.

I am convinced that Cervantes’ Don Quixote substantially influenced both Chandler and Murakami’s fictional works. Firstly, Don Quixote is centered around a protagonist out of step with his social world. His mission is to “do justice” according to a code that is no longer accepted as law. Marlowe and Boku, too, embark on explorations searching for something outside of the law, outside of convention—yet this object is ambiguous and doesn’t surely seem to exist. Interestingly, Don Quixote, Marlowe, and Boku each try to opt out of their respective societies’ money systems. Don Quixote goes from adventure to adventure without money, realizing a lifestyle which transcends the material world—even if this means frequent beatings and imprisonment. Similarly, Marlowe and Boku seem to see themselves as somehow above money—with Marlowe, in the case of rejecting Eileen’s money, and with Boku, the case of giving his money from the Boss’ people to J at the end. Also—Cervantes is known for parodying the literature of his contemporary society, particularly chivalric romances. He employs tropes from these romances and flips them on their head, exposing the absurdity of those stories which always tie up so neatly at the end. As Suter notes, Chandler is parodying rationalist detective stories, while Murakami parodies the Hard Boiled genre. Each of the three authors recombines different components of a conventional genre in a novel and subversive way. The parallels between A Wild Sheep Chase, Don Quixote, and The Long Goodbye are best brought to life by reading their endings. None of them are quite satisfying—or at least, none of them restore their world’s order as happy, fulfilling endings tend to do. We can’t make sense of Don Quixote’s regret at the end of the story, or Marlowe’s dispassionate reunion with Terry, or Boku’s relationship to rat, or what the sheep means in the end of it all. These unsatisfying endings are intentional—they challenge conventional narratives by showing that human journeys are cyclical by nature, never resolved. 

These ideas led me to think more about whether the parallels between Cervantes and Murakami/Chandler are just results of the intertextual nature of literature. After all, Don Quixote being (arguably) the first novel ever, I would be surprised if there were a novel entirely untouched by Cervantes’ influence. So, I sought out more explicit links. In The Long Goodbye, I found a line that I think must be a direct reference. 

Here are two lines, the first from Chandler and the second from Cervantes: 

“A difficult thing, being a cop. You never know whose stomach it’s safe to jump up and down on” (The Long Goodbye, 241).

“He climbed on top of his ribs and started to trop up and down from one end of them to the other” (Don Quixote, XVI). 

The idea of someone jumping up and down another’s stomach is very specific and unusual, which is why I think Chandler’s line must be a reference to the Quixote. In terms of Murakami, I did not find such an explicit link, but aside from the thematic parallels covered, it’s worth noting that Dostoevsky was one of his biggest influences. Dostoevsky writes that the Quixote is “the final and greatest utterance of the human mind.” As such an admirer of Dostoevsky, it would be shocking if he’d never thought to read his favorite book.