A nton Chekhov’s famous advice about narrative cohesion can be summed up thus: ‘Don’t put a loaded rifle onstage if no one’s going to fire it.’ Chekhov felt that writers should keep faith with their readers and audiences and not create narrative expectations that peter out into nothing. According to Chekhov, a narrative cannot betray its own internal logic. Hence ‘Chekhov’s gun’ is metaphorical shorthand for the theory that a narrative climax should feel inevitable, not randomly fluky, ludicrously unlikely or lazily convenient.
A Chekhovian gun can be an object inserted into a narrative in a manner that signals ‘hey look at this, it’s dramatically significant’ and foreshadows just such a revelation. In the early Harry Potter novels, for example, such stress is laid upon the hero’s neglected orphaned status that the surprise arrival of a Christmas or birthday present means much more than it would for another child. Harry’s past lack of gifts imbues the arrival of an invisibility cloak or a top-of-the-range broomstick with a highly charged significance. There is no way that these enchanted artefacts will end up unused.
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