What does the Flitcraft parable mean?
The story of Flitcraft, which Spade tells to Brigid O’Shaughnessy, is a parable of modern life. In literary terms it takes the idea of the Modernist epiphany and exposes it as a fleeting moment with no lasting effect. Flitcraft was a real-estate agent in Tacoma, Washington.
What is the moral of the flitcraft story?
The Flitcraft parable is a beam falling onto the centre of the novel and, it turns out, the key to its aesthetic: that everything you know and trust can be gone “like a fist when you open your hand”.
Why does Spade tell the flitcraft story?
This is the commonly offered reason for Spade telling her the parable: Spade is indirectly informing O’Shaughnessy that he does not expect her deceit to end. Like Flitcraft, the thinking goes, she too will not change. It seems too straightforward a decode for me. Sam Spade is not one for long-winded oratories.
What is flitcraft?
Flitcraft is a successful real-estate agent who lives in Tacoma, Washington, with his wife and two small children. His life could not be more ordinary. One day on his way to lunch he passes an office building that’s under construction and a beam falls from a great height, nearly killing him.
What did flitcraft tell his second wife?
“His second wife didn’t look like the first, but they were more alike than they were different. You know, the kind of women that play fair games of golf and bridge and like new salad-recipes… I don’t think he even knew he settled back naturally into the same groove he had jumped out of in Tacoma.”
What is the summary of the Flitcraft parable?
The Flitcraft Parable: Spade sat down in the armchair beside the table and without any preliminary, without an introductory remark of any sort, began to tell the girl about a thing that had happened some years before in the Northwest.
What was Flitcraft like as a person?
Flitcraft had been a good citizen and a good husband and father, not by any outer compulsion, but simply because he was a man most comfortable in step with his surroundings. He had been raised that way. The people he knew were like that.
Is it Flitcraft or Pierce?
It was Flitcraft, all right. He had been living in Spokane for a couple of years as Charles – that was his first name – Pierce.
What happened to Flitcraft?
A man named Flitcraft had left his real-estate-office, in Tacoma, to go to luncheon one day and had never returned. He did not keep and engagement to play golfafter four that afternoon, though he had taken the initiative in making the engagement less than half and hour before he went out to luncheon.