Again, Chekhov’s instinct seems to be toward variation, against stasis. One of his gifts is an ability to naturally impose variety on a situation that a lesser writer would leave static.

When a writer subjects us to a non-normative event—a physical implausibility, the use of markedly elevated language (or markedly vernacular language), or a series of lengthy digressions in a Russian pub in which the people keep freezing in midaction for several pages so that each can be described at length, in turn—he pays a price: our reading energy drops. (We get suspicious and resistant.) But if it doesn’t drop fatally, and if, later, we see that this was all part of the plan—if what seemed a failure of craft turns out to be integral to the story’s meaning (that is, it seems that he “meant to do that”)—then all is forgiven and we might even understand the profitable exploitation of that apparent excess as a form of virtuosity.

In a strange way, that’s the whole skill: to be able to lapse into a reasonable impersonation of yourself reading as if the prose in front of you (which you’ve already read a million times) was entirely new to you. When we go through a section of text like this, monitoring our responses and making changes accordingly, this manifests to the reader as evidence of care. (We might say that a first-time reader is able to intuit the many less-cared-for versions of a sentence behind the one the writer let stand.)

Well, of course, the writer is not the person. The writer is a version of the person who makes a model of the world that may seem to advocate for certain virtues, virtues by which he may not be able to live.

“Not only is the novelist nobody’s spokesman,” wrote Milan Kundera,

but I would go so far as to say he is not even the spokesman for his own ideas. When Tolstoy sketched the first draft of Anna Karenina, Anna was a most unsympathetic woman, and her tragic end was entirely deserved and justified. The final version of the novel is very different, but I do not believe that Tolstoy had revised his moral ideas in the meantime; I would say, rather, that in the course of writing, he was listening to another voice than that of his personal moral conviction. He was listening to what I would like to call the wisdom of the novel. Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.

Every story is narrated by someone, and since everyone has a viewpoint, every story is misnarrated (is narrated subjectively).

Since all narration is misnarration, Gogol says, let us misnarrate joyfully.

It’s like a prose version of the theory of relativity: no fixed, objective, “correct” viewpoint exists; an unbalanced narrator describes, in an unbalanced voice, the doings of a cast of unbalanced characters.

In other words, like life.