Multiple Personality in Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep”: Philip Marlowe meets Sexual Carmen and Murderous Carmen, but thinks it is epilepsy.

At first, I thought Raymond Chandler was hinting that Carmen Sternwood had multiple personality, when he had her refer to herself in the third-person: “I like you,” she said. “Carmen likes you a lot” (1, p. 89).

I was more convinced that this private detective, first-person narrator, Philip Marlowe, knew that Carmen had multiple personality, when he described her as switching from giggling, sexual, thumb-sucking Carmen to hissing, blank-eyed, mechanical Carmen (1, pp. 154-157).

But, remarkably, at the end of the novel, when Carmen asks Marlowe for shooting lessons, takes him to an isolated place, and then she proceeds to shoot him in the chest, again and again, at close range—she didn’t know he had loaded the gun with blanks—and she then has amnesia for the episode (1, pp. 216-220), he and her older sister conclude that it was due to epilepsy, since she had murdered and had spells before.

The evidence for their diagnosis of epilepsy was that after Carmen saw that Marlowe wasn’t shot, and he ridiculed her attempt by saying, “My, but you’re cute” (1, p. 220), she started to shake, dropped the gun, appeared unconscious, clenched her mouth (like she might bite her tongue), and wet herself (urinary incontinence).

Now, she may or may not have had epilepsy in addition to multiple personality. You can’t say definitively unless you have EEG confirmation. And although it is often said that only people with true epilepsy would bite their tongue and wet themselves, it is a myth. Self-injury and incontinence also happen in psychogenic seizures (2).

In any case, it doesn’t really matter whether she had epilepsy, because epilepsy can’t account for her socially complex, goal-directed, murderous behavior that preceded the alleged seizure, and her amnesia for that whole murderous episode, not for only the brief time of the alleged seizure; whereas, amnesia for the whole attempted murder would be typical if she had now switched away from her murderous alternate personality.

How did Chandler understand his descriptions of Carmen’s dramatically different, giggling/sexual and hissing personalities. He didn’t seem to think that the latter was just an ordinary reaction to frustration of the former. He apparently felt that Carmen had some sort of serious mental disturbance. My guess is that he knew someone who had seizure-like behavior as one symptom of their multiple personality, which is relatively common (3, p. 66).

In short, The Big Sleep is one more example of how unintentional multiple personality is present in literature, unrecognized by either the author or most readers. Its unintentional presence suggests that it reflects something about the author’s own psychology.

1. Raymond Chandler. The Big Sleep [1939]. New York, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 1992.

2. Peguero E, et al. Self-injury and incontinence in psychogenic seizures. Epilepsia. 1995 Jun;36(6):586-91.

3. Frank W. Putnam. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.