Some of my favorite characters are flat. Not flat in a bad way, and not bad in a good way. They are characterized as they need to be, as is their necessity, and live out their paginated life thataway.
The insecure writer hates flatpeople. If a flatperson is found hiding behind a thick passage of exposition, the insecure grabs hold of him, and puts him under the knife for psychological implants. Reason? To make him more “rounded,” to give him “depth” he deserves. Whatever the rationale, this is literary cruelty of the first order. Such surgery is a vulgar affront to flatness. To be flat is not to desire roundedness!
In Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, the exceptional flatperson Harry Jones is introduced and dispatched within twenty pages. As we learn many times, Harry Jones is small. He’s very small. He’s little, short. He’s “not more than five feet three and would hardly weigh as much as a butcher’s thumb.” Jones is a crook, and not a resplendent one. He’s been conspicuously tailing protagonist Marlowe’s car for days. He’s clumsy, skittish. He’ll never be big time, but he’s got style. Dignity and smarts, too.
It doesn’t take long for protagonist Marlowe to appreciate the considerable charm of Jones. “The little man wasn’t so dumb after all,” he thinks, after hearing Jones out. “A three for a quarter grifter wouldn’t even think such thoughts, much less know how to express them.” As their first and only encounter comes to a close, Marlowe grows downright sweet on the guy: “He puffed evenly and stared at me level-eyed, a funny little hard guy I could have thrown from home plate to second base. A small man in a big man’s world. There was something I liked about him.”
Anyway, Jones drinks cyanide in the next chapter. Marlow finds him dead, and pays tribute: “???Well, you fooled him, Harry,’ I said out loud, in a voice that sounded queer to me. ???You liked to him and you drank your cyanide like a little gentleman. You died like a poisoned rat, Harry, but you’re no rat to me.’”
Here, here!
In Marlowe’s offhanded elegy, Chandler celebrates the life of the flat character. There’s no wrongheaded remorse that Jones wasn’t more “rounded,” more “life-like”–only sorrow that it wasn’t his lot to inhabit more pages.
The next time you encounter a flat character, don’t balk. Don’t wish that he or she were more like you. Don’t do that. Think of Jones. Think of Harry Jones, and think again.