Freudian Field (& Stream) Day

Maybe it's because I'm coming away from the overdrawn sexual metaphors of Twilight that this jumped out so readily at me and maybe not, but I was just reading some more of The Omnivore's Dilemma and ran across the following paragraph.  It occurs in the section when he's talking about his "hunter-gatherer" phase of the food chain, when he tried to put together a meal made up of things that he had either killed himself or gathered himself in the woods.  After an unsuccessful first hunting trip (unsuccessful in the sense that he didn't kill an animal himself, though his companion did), he is debating whether he needed to go hunting again:

In the days after I wasn't sure whether I needed to go hunting again.  I had my meat.  And I had been hunting:  I felt like I had a good idea of what it was all about, or nearly all about--the hunter's way of being in nature and the way of the pigs.  I'd spotted the prey and witnessed the kill.  I had a pretty good story, too.  And yet everyone to whom I told it managed to remind me how unsatisfactory the ending was.  You mean you never even fired your gun?!  I'd violated the Chekhovian dramatic rule:  Having introduced a loaded gun in Act One, the curtain can't come down until it is fired.  I might miss, but the gun had to be fired.  That at least seemed to be the narrative imperative.

I'm not only filing this under "Books" but also under "Culture & Society" because I think it begs the question as to whether we can introduce a gun into any narrative (real or metaphorical) and not fire it.  I think that we'll be in a better place as a society when we can answer that firing the gun is not always necessary. 

Have fun with that!