George Saunders

A story is a frank, intimate conversation between equals. We keep reading because we continue to feel respected by the writer.

The boldness of this leap teaches us something important about the short story: it is not a documentary or rigorous accounting of the passage of time or a fair-minded attempt to show life as it is really lived; it’s a radically shaped, even somewhat cartoonish (when held up against the tedious real world) little machine that thrills us with the extremity of its decisiveness.

Chekhov doesn’t stop here because he evidently feels that he can, within that remaining half page, find some further escalation. He’s on the hunt for one more expansion in meaning. Let’s see what he does next. (I feel like one of those whispering golf announcers: “Anton is approaching the end of the story, Verne. What a moment!”)

Some readers (Tolstoy among them) have tried to make “The Darling” a story about women—about how a woman should or should not be, a commentary on a certain type of subservient woman who derives her sense of identity from men alone. I think this sells the story short. To me, “The Darling” is about a tendency, present in all of us, to misunderstand love as “complete absorption in,” rather than “in full communication with.”

The story seems to be asking, “Is this trait of hers good or bad?”

Chekhov answers: “Yes.”

Well, of course, the writer is not the person. The writer is a version of the person who makes a model of the world that may seem to advocate for certain virtues, virtues by which he may not be able to live.

“The queen died, and then the king died” (E. M. Forster’s famous formulation) describes two unrelated events occurring in sequence. It doesn’t mean anything. “The queen died, and the king died of grief ” puts those events into relation; we understand that one caused the other. The sequence, now infused with causality, means: “That king really loved his queen.”

The preferred, most efficient, highest-order form of energy transfer (the premier way for a scene to advance the story in a non-trivial way) is for a beat to cause the next beat, especially if that next beat is felt as essential, i.e., as an escalation: a meaningful alteration in the terms of the story.

“Always be escalating,” then, can be understood as “Be alert, always, to the possibilities you have created for variation.” If an element recurs, the second appearance is an opportunity for variation and, potentially, escalation.

If a person gives his life to save another person, and the saved person never thinks about it, doesn’t appear grateful, seems unchanged by it, it makes us wonder about the value of the sacrifice. It also makes us wonder about the person saved.

It also makes us wonder about the writer.