Of course, something has to happen with that gun. So, when his parents go out for the evening and his older sister invites a boy over (a football player, someone he finds intimidating), he decides to take out his gun and clean it and the tension mounts. The gun has the potential to be a force for good, but it carries with it the possibility of danger. His desire to be strong and heroic is clear. In reality, he simply shoots tin cans, but in his imagination he’s the hero triumphing over Nazis and saving beautiful girls from rivers. In it, a thirteen-year-old boy goes off into the woods with his gun to play out adventures. When I think of this advice from Chekhov, I often think of “The Intruder,” a short story by Andre Dubus. If you give something significance early in the story, follow through on it. If nothing comes of it, readers can feel duped. To give it attention is a signal to readers that they should pay attention. It’s full of meaning it has the potential for danger and death. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.Ĭhekhov is warning against extraneous detail. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on a wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. This concept is fleshed out a bit in Memoirs, in which S. One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it. In an 1889 letter to playwright Aleksandr Semenovich Lazarev, Chekhov wrote: The term “Chekhov’s gun” comes from a bit of advice Chekhov shared with other writers. And it is one of the greatest stories every written. There is no problem, no regular climax, no point at the end. Author Vladimir Nabokov ends his essay “A Reading of Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’” with this:Īll the traditional rules of story telling have been broken in this wonderful short story of twenty pages or so. What's this business about "Chekhov's gun"?Īnton Chekhov, a Russian author and playwright (and doctor) is often considered a master storyteller.
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