Gillian Horn
8-9-13
For the Extended Close Reading, I chose the passage on page 47, “Spade emptied the unconscious man’s pockets one by one, working methodically, moving the lax body when necessary, making a pile of the pockets’ contents on the desk…..” This passage is written after Cairo is knocked out by Spade. Cairo is lying on the ground unconscious, and Spade brings him up to a chair and sits him down. He goes straight to the pockets and starts to investigate. After he goes through the wallet, he takes what he finds and he goes to his desk and lights a cigarette and examines what he finds. He is very casual about what happens. I believe he seems very casual about this because it says he began to examine his spoils and he examined them with unhurried thoroughness. Rather than being worried about the unconscious man, he simply ignores him and makes his way right to his desk to get comfortable and smoke while he examines the things in the man’s pocket that he casually takes out.
Spade throughout the book shows this kind of action of being so laid back when it comes to comes across with other people. Clearly here it may not be so laid back to begin with, but he approaches things professionally with Cairo and he knows how to handle his suspects and his subjects while getting what he needs. Cairo is clearly frightened now about how much Spade can do and the threat that he may have on him now after beating him up.
One could say from the book so far, that spade would be described as a clever, BI polar, genius detective. He has methods of discovering things that will often help him but also hurt him. Most things for him are easy to work out, but he needs to put in the patience and it will be solved. he does lack patience, but he has many other qualities that take the place for that. He shows how aware and how simple he makes things when they are complicated through his encounter with Cairo. Clearly Cairo could’ve been very dangerous towards Spade, but Spade knew how to control the situation before it could get any more violent.