Life & Wisdom Quote by Raymond Chandler

Chandler takes a perfectly serviceable noir simile - the woman recoiling "like a startled fawn" - and then deliberately trips over it. That second clause ("if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me") is the gag: an over-literal, deadpan correction that punctures the poetry he just tried to inflate. The effect is twofold. It’s funny in the way Chandler is funny: not with punchlines, but with a wisecrack that exposes how hard-boiled language is always performing. The narrator reaches for elegance, then immediately mocks his own reach, as if sentiment were a lapse that needs to be punished.

The subtext is distrust. Noir heroes don’t just doubt women; they doubt their own reactions to women. By sabotaging the simile, Chandler shows a mind allergic to sincerity, trained to keep everything at arm’s length. The woman’s fear might be real, but the narrator won’t let it become lyrical, because lyricism implies vulnerability. So he yanks the reader back into the trench: this is a guy who notices his own metaphors and doesn’t like what they reveal about him.

Context matters: Chandler is writing in a tradition where masculine cool is maintained through posture and language. Here, the voice becomes the scene. The joke also signals class and urbanity - a private eye who’s read enough, or heard enough, to know clichés when he’s using them. That self-awareness is the modern edge: the line works because it’s a simile and an anti-simile at once, romance immediately frisked for contraband.