Chekhov’s Gun

Face-value the following:

She, quickly, and nimbly, slipped through the door, finally sheltered away from the icy wind that aided its swift shut. All in one motion and thereafter, the tall lady, soignée, shrouded in black, stood scanning the layout of the wooden room, the door still at her back. She removed her sunglasses. Odd to wear sunglasses in the snow. No – snowblindness. But it was not sunny. Well, then for a shaded look-through, eased the ocular effort. And to feel twice-removed. She fricated her hands and exhaled the warmth of her breath into them.

The barren, windowless room had one wooden table positioned in front of an unused fireplace with two wooden chairs facing each other from opposite sides, which made her uneasy. Empty furniture implied an invisible population. Two appeared in noiseless conversation, then disappeared. On the table laid a glass vase, and, under it, what looked like a notecard. Coming closer to it, she recognized her name scrawled on the front. It fixed her. The same way a war horn sucks the valor out of an army. After a long, immobile moment, she managed to draw in a breath and with it turned then through the door back out into the blizzard, anywhere but there, a montage of inner images freakishly flashing, the slam of the door still resounding.

… … …

The next day the blizzard let up. She had less trouble passing through the door. The room looked the same as it did the day before. Eerily the same. That dreadful notecard was still there, the first thing her eye reflexed to, mocking in its mute insistence. With an exercise of will, she ignored it, walking past it. A residuum of screaming anxiety heightened. She quickly grabbed the key on the ring tacked to the spot beside the fireplace of the far wall, pivoted, and exited with a skipping heart, cold all over. This time, the resounding slam of the door was relieving.

*

Unsatisfied? Left on an ellipsis? The renowned Russian writer Anton Chekhov felt so similarly affronted by this “erroneous” device that it was named after him, forever linking him to his bane. In a letter to a friend on the subject, he famously illustrates by way of a fictional gun:

“If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”

This is now known as “Chekhov’s Gun.” It’s when an inessential element is included in the story that does not progress the narrative, or is irrelevant to it. To Chekhov, this is a mistake, the fabulist’s fallacy. But others, like Hemingway, deliberately use inconsequential details to enhance their narrative, and disdain the rule.

In the above excerpt, there may be many “guns.” Can you discern them all?