Chekhov's gun is a literary technique whereby an apparently irrelevant element is introduced early in the story whose significance becomes clear later in the narrative. The concept is named after Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, who mentioned several variants of the concept in letters. Chekhov himself makes use of this principle in Uncle Vanya: Towards the end of the play, Uncle Vanya, in a rage, grabs a pistol which has been present from early on as a seemingly irrelevant prop and tries to commit homicide.
The phrase "Chekhov's gun" is often interpreted as a method of foreshadowing, but the concept can also be interpreted as meaning "do not include any unnecessary elements in a story." Failure to observe the rule of "Chekhov's gun" may be cited by critics when discussing plot holes.
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The earliest form of "Chekhov's gun" was repetitive designation. This foreshadowing technique dates back to the One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights), which contains "repeated references to some character or object which appears insignificant when first mentioned but which reappears later to intrude suddenly in the narrative".[2]
A notable example is in the tale of "The Three Apples", a murder mystery narrated in the Arabian Nights. At the beginning of the story, a fisherman discovers a heavy locked chest along the Tigris river and he sells it to the Abbasid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid, who then has the chest broken open to see what is inside. The story describes multiple layers of shawls and carpets in great detail until a dead body of a young woman who was cut into pieces is revealed underneath it all. He then orders his vizier, Ja'far ibn Yahya, to investigate the crime.[3][4] The shawls and carpets described in the beginning appear to play no part in the story until two men, one young and one old, claiming to be the murderer reveal themselves near the middle of the story. Both men argue and call each other liars as each attempts to confess to the crime.[5] This continues until the young man proves that he is the murderer by accurately describing the contents of the chest in which the young woman was found, including the multiple layers of shawls and carpets. He then narrates his reasons for the murder as a flashback of events leading up to the body's discovery at the beginning of the story.[6]
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