Chekhov’s Open Ending in “The Lady with the Dog”

    “And only now when his head was grey he had fallen properly, really in love—for the first time in his life.

    Anna Sergeyevna and he loved each other like people very close and akin, like husband and wife, like tender friends; it seemed to them that fate itself had meant them for one another, and they could not understand why he had a wife and she a husband; and it was as though they were a pair of birds of passage, caught and forced to live in different cages. They forgave each other for what they were ashamed of in their past, they forgave everything in the present, and felt that this love of theirs had changed them both.

    In moments of depression in the past he had comforted himself with any arguments that came into his mind, but now he no longer cared for arguments; he felt profound compassion, he wanted to be sincere and tender….

    “Don’t cry, my darling,” he said. “You’ve had your cry; that’s enough…. Let us talk now, let us think of some plan.”

    Then they spent a long while taking counsel together, talked of how to avoid the necessity for secrecy, for deception, for living in different towns and not seeing each other for long at a time. How could they be free from this intolerable bondage?

    “How? How?” he asked, clutching his head. “How?”

    And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and splendid life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.”

    — “The Lady with the Dog” by Anton Chekhov

    Technique

    In “The Lady with the Dog,” Anton Chekhov writes an anticlimactic open ending with three key techniques:

    • Building up the story with free-indirect discourse
    • Setting up an epiphany for the characters
    • Ending the story open-ended

    Chekhov uses free-indirect discourse to tell readers how the characters are feeling deep love for each other and build emotion toward the ending. He signals the free-indirect discourse technique twice with the word “felt” (bold for emphasis):

    “They forgave each other for what they were ashamed of in their past, they forgave everything in the present, and felt that this love of theirs had changed them both.”

    “… he felt profound compassion, he wanted to be sincere and tender….”

    Next, the characters have a sudden realization or epiphany that they need to come up with a plan to be together. Dmitri wonders how (“How? How?”) they will execute a plan because they have a “long, long road before them” that’s “most complicated and difficult.” This ends the story in uncertainty and anticlimax because despite Chekhov’s emotional buildup, their predicament doesn’t promise a happy ending.

    Use

    • Open endings require careful planning, especially in the early parts of a story. The writer must write as if the story is building up to answer an impossible question without giving away possible solutions early in the story. This can mean leaving out key context to create gaps in the narrative that can only be connected at the end.

      In Chekhov’s case, he wrote a story with an anticlimactic ending because he knew that there was not an answer to the question of how the two characters would ultimately be together due to how rare and complicated divorce was in the Russian Empire at the time.