Richard F. Schiller
Richard F. Schiller, known as Dick, is the young, hard-of-hearing mechanic and war veteran who marries Dolores Haze when she is seventeen and pregnant. He is the final, decisive figure in Lolita's flight from the two men who exploited her—Humbert Humbert and Clare Quilty—and his ordinary decency throws into stark relief the irreparable damage done to her childhood. Dick is not a predator or a genius; he is a lamb, and his presence in the novel's closing pages seals the tragedy of Humbert's loss and Lolita's diminished but free adulthood.
Identity and Background
Dick is a young man with Arctic blue eyes, black hair, ruddy cheeks, and an unshaven chin. He is a veteran of a remote war and works as a mechanic, a trade in which he is promised a job in Alaska in his "very specialized corner of the mechanical field." He is hard of hearing, a fact that forces his wife to shout when speaking to him. His fingernails are black and broken, but his hands—the strong, shapely wrist and phalanges—are far finer than Humbert's own twisted, guilty hands. He lives with Dolly in a clapboard shack on Hunter Road in the dismal industrial town of Coalmont, a place of dump and ditch, wormy vegetable gardens, and gray drizzle. His parents, stout and beaming, live with Dick's brother's family in Juneau.
Life with Dolores
Dick believes that Dolly ran away from an upper-class home just to wash dishes in a diner; he knows nothing of her past with Humbert or Quilty. He is a lamb, a decent and trusting man who treats Dolly with kindness. He and his one-armed friend Bill work on a neighbor's shack, drinking beer and fixing wires. When Humbert visits, Dick offers to sleep in the kitchen on a spare mattress so that his father-in-law can stay. He is silent and awkward in Humbert's presence, rubbing his nose and frowning, clearly wanting to say something like "Aw, she's a swell kid, Mr. Haze. She sure is. And she's going to make a swell mother." Dolly, for her part, is fond of him; she calls him a lamb and says they are quite happy together, though she admits that Quilty was the only man she was ever "crazy about."
Humbert's Encounter with Dick
When Humbert arrives at the shack on Hunter Road, Dick is perched on a ladder fixing something near a neighbor's house. Dolly calls him in, and he enters the parlor with a grin of relief. Humbert, who has come intending to kill the man who took Lolita, realizes immediately that Dick is not his target. The two men sit alone for a few minutes, and Humbert feels an idle urge to squeeze the blackheads on Dick's perspiring nose. He notes that Dick and Dolly have had unrestrained intercourse on the couch at least a hundred and eighty times, but he feels no grudge—only grief and nausea. When Humbert leaves, he gives Dolly four thousand dollars, and she exults, planning to fly to Alaska and buy a car there. Dick is the beneficiary of this money, the means by which the young couple can start their new life.
Narrative Role and Significance
Dick Schiller is the anti-type to both Humbert and Quilty. Where Humbert is a sophisticated, obsessive European intellectual and Quilty a debauched, manipulative artist, Dick is a simple, honest working man. He represents the normal, healthy life that Lolita might have had if she had never been victimized. His presence in the novel's final act is a cruel irony for Humbert: the man who now possesses Lolita is not a rival to be destroyed but a decent person who cannot be hated. Dick's very ordinariness makes Humbert's loss absolute. He is also a symbol of Lolita's final, desperate choice: she has traded the gilded cage of Humbert's obsession and the sordid glamour of Quilty's world for a life of poverty, hard work, and genuine, if unremarkable, love. In the end, Humbert can only hope that Dick will always treat her well, threatening that his specter will come at him "like black smoke, like a demented giant" if he does not.
