The Failure to Find Happy Endings in The Dungeon Master, a

Short Story by Sam Lipsyte

The ending of Sam Lipsyte's short story does something blatantly unrealistic and knows it - but then
again, it doesn't. It teases the reader with an inexplicable flash-forward, and then in response to the
unsaid "do you really see that?" says flatly, "Of course I don't."The dysfunctional teenagers of
"Dungeon Master" do not, in this flash-forward, find happy endings. That they should find the endings
they do -- that the Dungeon Master should kill himself, that Cherninsky should become a thief as he
said all along, that the protagonist should work in a fast food joint and thus become the dullest version
of the trademark American teenager -- is not so surprising, but the story's method is unique. "Do I
have an almost uncanny sense," says the narrator as the Dungeon Master drives away, "of what's to
come, some cold swirling vision...?" He takes such a dramatic, fantastical angle only to end the look
into the future with, "Of course I don't." How would the effect change had the story taken a different
approach -- the straightforward ("I had no idea that one day I'd see the Dungeon Master, blue-
cheeked...") or the supernatural ("I have an uncanny sense of what's to come...")? I can see both of
the former being at home in the beginning or ending of a stereotypical romantic comedy ("Little did I
know/I had a feeling that this man would change my life...") "Dungeon Master" swaps these
approaches for a clipped, critical "of course I don't" more in line with the tone and events of the story
prior. It's as if to say, "Will anything strange happen? Of course not." Of course their lives won't turn
out well, just as they haven't amounted to much throughout -- not even in their death-filled dungeon
fantasies.

Don't know where to start with your assignment?

HIRE VERIFIED EXPERT
Let our experts help you