Chekhov’s great insight into the art of narrative was that endings need not be neat. The fact that a story comes to an end does not mean that the characters freeze in the moment and remain frozen. No: there are no ends. Unlike game shows, there are no final answers.
This tale, “A Story Without an End,” is a meta-example of that narrative philosophy, with a meta-title and many meta-fictional touches: It’s narrated by a well-known author, and the characters discuss how he, as an author, might use the events of the story in a story of his own. How would it turn out then?
The story begins on an exceptionally strong note: Late at night, the narrator is summoned to a neighbor’s house, where something terrible has happened. He hurries out, and the scene that greets him next door is ghoulish and confusing: In the middle of the living room stands a coffin, the body visible inside. In the next room, a man lies on the floor in a pool of blood, croaking piteously for water.
We soon learn that the blood-soaked man has tried to kill himself, following the tragic death of his wife, who lies in the next room. Somehow, in attempting to shoot himself, he has barely grazed the skin between two ribs.
So far so good, but at this point the tale turns talky and metafictional.
The man on the floor happens to be known to the narrator. He is an actor, and as any committed reader of Chekhov’s stories knows, no actor can be portrayed as anything but chump, cad, wastrel or weasel. In this case, the actor is a narcissist, a poseur. Lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood, he proceeds to launch into an overwrought soliloquy about the essential mysteries of suicide. He also talks about the nature of narrative, suggesting that the course of one of the narrator’s novels might be changed simply by the light of a single candle. One little light could, like the beating of a butterfly’s wings, make all the difference in how a life might proceed.
Sigh. It’s more than a bit over-ripe.
There follows further verbal jousting, such as you might expect to hear in a salon or on the lawn of a dacha. That the palaver is coming from a man whose wife has just died and who himself has just fired a bullet (ineptly) into his own chest, is totally absurd. The absurdity of the scene makes the story sag, maybe even snap, in the middle.
All right. A year passes; the narrator and the actor have become friends of a sort. The actor has recovered his good spirits: He is in the writer’s apartments, playing a piano and entertaining a group of ladies.
Meanwhile, the writer polishes off his latest story: It’s the story of the actor and his suicide. But how, he asks the actor, shall the story end?
How indeed? This being Chekhov, of course there is no neat conclusion. Because stories don’t always work that way.
But it’s still a pretty minor work.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
Chekhov’s fictional double dips in and out of his stories as a narrator, sometimes in the guise of a writer, as in this story and “Ariadne,” sometimes as a doctor (“Lights”). What’s unusual about this story is the active role his doppelganger plays in the story. Usually, the double is merely relating a story that he has heard from someone else.
For another story that features a Chekhov stand-in who is not a mere reteller of someone else’s story, try “A Play,” in which a famous writer gets to vent his annoyance with an importunate fan in a very aggressive way.
A Chekhov Circus 