‘Resistance’ by Stephan Enter

Resistance by Stephan Enter, 2009

The magic trick:

Using a narrator’s emotional framing at the start of the story to guide the reader’s response

So I think we’ve probably seen this before on the short story magic tricks website, but I’ll highlight it again. We haven’t seen many Dutch chess stories. The content is new, I promise. The magic trick maybe isn’t.

Anyway, the story begins with the narrator assigning a certain emotional value to the story’s contents. He’s looking back many years later and saying you know this is really affected me I didn’t realize just how much. So it sets the reader up before the plot really even get started to ascribe certain emotions to the story. We expect something sad, maybe even tragic, and we expect something that’s gonna be loaded with regret.

So that establishes a certain kind of suspense, and it also casts a cloud over the story where we almost project regret and sadness into whatever is happening as we read on. And that’s quite a trick on Enter’s part.

The selection:

I just happened to see his death notice one day. I would never have known otherwise. It reminded of the time I found myself back home in my attic bedroom after years of being away, in the twilight by the tilting window, broken-spined volumes of Karl May suddenly appear beneath the pale layer of dust and shoeboxes too.

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