Chekhov’s gun

Authors use a literary technique called “foreshadowing.”  They leave clues for the reader to foresee what might come later on in the story, such that when events unfold the reader does not feel cheated because in some way the development of the plot was earlier hinted at.

The term often used as shorthand for “foreshadowing” is Chekhov’s gun.  Anton Chekhov wrote in a letter, “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.”  Nothing should come as a complete surprise in a story.

This is true even of such a piece as “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” a short story by Ambrose Bierce, which has a surprise ending.

Set during the American Civil War, it tells of Peyton Farquhar, a Confederate sympathizer condemned to die by hanging on the Owl Creek Bridge, a railroad bridge in Alabama.

Farquhar stands bound at the bridge’s edge at the beginning of the story, about to be hanged.  While he waits for the moment of his execution, he remembers his wife and children.  A plan flashes through his mind to “throw off the noose and spring into the stream.”  He believes that “by diving I could evade the bullets and, swimming vigorously, take to the woods and get away home.”

The soldiers drop him down.  But the rope breaks and Farquhar falls into the water. He unties the noose from around his neck and surfaces.  He realizes that the soldiers are shooting at him, but he escapes and makes it to dry land. He then sets out on the long journey for home through a deserted and seemingly-endless forest.  Tired and hungry, he falls asleep.  When he wakes up, he sees his home and his wife outside it.  But as he runs towards her, he feels a searing pain in his neck, a white light flashes, and everything goes black – Farquhar hangs from the rope, dead.  It turns out that he merely imagined his escape.

If we carefully read the story, we can find suggestions of this.  That none of the countless shots  fired at Farquhar ever found its mark, that he felt that his senses had become superhuman because he could see the individual blades of grass and the colors of the bugs on the leaves of trees even though he whirled around in the river – these tell of the illusory character of the escape.
Jesus is the most “foreshadowed” man in scripture.  Scholars list more than 300 prophecies in the Old Testament concerning the Messiah.  But even in the Gospels I find a case of “foreshadowing,” a hint of forthcoming events in the life of Jesus.

In Luke, for instance, I read that, at the beginning of his public ministry, Jesus returned to Nazareth, and on a Sabbath day he read in the synagogue a passage from Isaiah about the Christ.  The people knew him only as a carpenter’s son and resented his claim that Isaiah’s words were fulfilled in him.  When Jesus told them that he did not find acceptance in his hometown, they became angry and brought him to the brow of a hill at the edge of Nazareth in order to throw him down the cliff.  But Jesus walked right through the crowd and went on his way.
We know, of course, that the authorities in Jerusalem put Jesus to death because of the things that he said, because of his claim that he was the Messiah, the Son of God.  The incident in Nazareth, where the people were so outraged by Jesus’ statements that they wanted to kill him, was a sign of things to come.

The hill of Nazareth suggests the hill of Golgotha where Jesus was crucified.

In Nazareth, Jesus escaped death.  The escape points to his escape on Easter morning.  The Jewish and Roman authorities made sure that he was dead – they pierced his side with a spear, they sealed his tomb with a stone.  In “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” Farquhar merely imagined his escape, his death was real.  The death of Jesus might as well have been imagined.  All that the authorities got for their effort was an empty tomb.  Jesus rose from the dead.  His escape was real.