50 pages • 1 hour read
The Thin Man
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Symbols & Motifs
Money
Money is a motif that drives the characters of The Thin Man. While it is a common motive in detective fiction, greed and poverty in hardboiled novels written during the Great Depression amp up the significance of the motif, as much of the audience felt financial anxiety.
Money is the reason Nick and Nora are able to live as they do, and it seems to be the only thing that separates the classes in the world of the novel. While Nora reads biographies of famous opera singers and socializes with archeologists, the Wynant family is able to move in similar circles, despite not showing the same sort of education or inclinations.
Money is the key to social status in the novel, and so when Macaulay loses it, he becomes increasingly desperate, in essence no different than the blackmailer Nunheim. The corrupting influence of money can be seen in the scramble by all the characters who want more of it: Mimi plans to blackmail her husband, Rosewater illegally marries for money and then plans to leave his wife when it’s gone, and Macaulay is driven to murder.
Alcohol and the Speakeasy
The protagonist, Nick Charles, starts and ends his day with a stiff drink and doesn’t sit with anyone in between without suggesting they have one. The novel’s opening scene is in a speakeasy, and many visits are made to similar establishments throughout the novel. Because alcohol is illegal at the time, the characters’ indulgence is criminal. Alcohol becomes a motif illustrating the lawlessness of the setting and implies a looseness of the rules. It also emphasizes the theme of the Impossibility of Justice in a Corrupt Society, as even the enforcer of the law, the police detective John Guild, has a bottle in his desk.
That Nick is able to drink so much and behave well shows that he is able to walk the line between the lawbreakers and the law enforcers. Indeed, he is trusted by Guild the policeman and Morelli the gangster alike. He can dip into the world that symbolizes illegal activity, the speakeasy, and pick up clues and have drinks without losing his cool. When he brings the clues to Guild’s office, he turns down the offer of a drink, saying he “had never had much luck with policemen’s liquor” (170), a moment that tells the reader Nick’s form of justice isn’t the same as the law’s. He emphasizes this idea at the end when he tells Nora he doesn’t work in facts but in the realm of probably: “It’s a word you’ve got to use a lot in this business” (199). This middle ground and gray area, where the hero constantly breaks the law and yet remains untarnished, is sustained by the motif of illegal alcohol and the speakeasy.
Thinness
The motif of thinness runs throughout the novel, and its change in meaning finally reveals the truth to Nick. During most of the story, this word is interpreted as a physical description of the missing man, Wynant. This changes, however, with the discovery of the body of a supposedly large man. Nick switches the definition of the word that had before meant physical thinness to that which lacks substance or validity. This switch throws light on the case and allows the pieces to fall into place. For the majority of the novel, the information about Wynant is seen to have substance. The letters are assumed to be real. But with the knowledge that Wynant has been dead for months, the title reveals itself to have pointed to the solution the entire time. The Thin Man references not only Wynant’s form but also the fact that he no longer exists. He has no substance. If one knows this fact, the solution is easy, and the title gives away the answer when read with Nick’s reinterpretation of the motif in mind.
With knowledge of the true meaning of the motif, everything in the novel’s world begins to look thin. The letters are forgeries, the stories Mimi and her family tell are frail and unbelievable, and the body found in the workshop is thinly enough disguised that it takes Nick mere moments to infer the identity of the corpse. The motif continues through the end when Nick explains to Nora that the characters will mostly go back to their old lives. The experience was thin enough in substance that they will not change, a fact that Nora comments is “pretty unsatisfactory” (201).
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By Dashiell Hammett
