A Story I Loved: "The Dungeon Master" by Sam Lipsyte
- Staff Writer
- Aug 8
- 5 min read
Updated: Aug 12
Today’s story is “The Dungeon Master”, written by Sam Lipsyte. I want to disclaim by saying that I love Sam Lipsyte’s work in a way that no critic should really love a story they are supposed to be analyzing. Well, that’s to say- I love “The Dungeon Master”, intensely and irrationally. I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed myself reading a New Yorker story.
His Wikipedia page notes that he’s characterized by his “verbal acumen”, and I would say that’s pretty accurate. Few writers I know are real masters of dialogue- I would count maybe Lipsky, Salinger, and Raymond Carver in that rare category. But here, Lipsyte is able to capture the way people speak, and even better- he makes it entertaining to read. Think about conversations at dinner parties or meetings with acquaintances where you’re on your verbal A-game, trying to sound as sharp and interesting as possible, and you get a good rhythm going with someone else. Reading Lipsyte’s dialogue here is kind of like that- like watching a great tennis game. Everything adds up. You can’t admire the trick-shots without the rest of the handiwork, the buildup, the solid form that allows for the trick-shots to exist in the first place.
The story premise is simple enough: it’s a group of boys who gather weekly to play Dungeons & Dragons, the role-playing fantasy game. I wonder, from a fellow writer to another, if Lipsyte chose Dungeons & Dragons because it evokes a specific kind of character for most readers- a nerdy teenage boy who is probably intense about the game, a little obsessive, a little closed off from the real world. Or maybe Lipsyte simply played the game as a kid, and related most heavily to it. The characters read faintly fantastical, but only a little- if I half-close my eyes, these are all people I’ve met before. The teenage boy at the crux of the story is just intelligent enough that little cues get passed onto the reader, but maybe that's the tragedy of this story- he's just observant enough to realize how depressing life is, but he's not "brilliant" enough, as most people are, to change his life around, to become something exceptional. His mother makes an interesting remark during a conversation about not becoming "middle-track" people. Spoiler alert: we learn at the end, that he has become, in fact, a decidedly middle-track person. There is already a premonition of foreshadowing indicating it, simply by the tense Lipsyte chooses to use, narrating omnisciently, and that's a powerful choice on his end- it gives the whole story a haunted, fairytale-like power, like a Dungeon Master simply reciting a story to his players.
The narrator, this unnamed teenage boy, does most of his living in the game. That's not really meant to be an inference on my part- the rest of his life that is shown throughout the story is portrayed as drab. Lipsyte does a good job of portraying a specific kind of boy- the one that describes his sister's personality in terms of her clothing choices and how much time she spends on the phone. The boy's home life is indicated to not be great- his family is suggested to be suffering from some kind of economic downturn. He doesn’t have much luck with girls or other friends at school. So of course, naturally, he turns to the heroism and fantasy and escapism inherent in a game like Dungeons & Dragons. It’s such a child-like response that you can’t help but identify with him, and it makes the rest of the story more chilling.
The Dungeon Master, or the master of the game, is the one who dictates the player’s choices, and he is cruel and tyrannical. Most of the dialogue is done within the context of the game, and you can see how it becomes an instrument to reveal various foils and personality traits, the particular cruelties of someone who feels aggrieved about his very existence and takes it out on other people. The game, which is supposed to be a safe haven, a fantasy, for the lives of these boys who don’t have the most ideal home lives outside of it, becomes a way in which to exercise control and to give some kind of message. What is the message? We never find out, at the end. One can have their guesses, but I think the message is less the point here than the messenger, and his own reasons for trying to give a message. The Dungeon Master's "lessons" are self-important and righteous, and they're clearly the machinations of someone who thinks they are much smarter than they are. What is a lesson, anyways? That there is always somebody bigger pulling the strings? Who can drag you down, for reasons you can't understand or fathom? It's almost Lovecraft-ian, in a sense. There is a cosmos, and a Dungeon Master, a primordial being, who is cognitively aware on some level, but only views you as some kind of lesson or ideal to destroy, a mildly amusing toy. No matter how valiant you try to be- there will always be a Dungeon Master ready to cut you down, for the sole purpose being that they can. The lesson is that there are no lessons, but it doesn't reveal anything about the world. It reveals only a singular person's mindset, and their capacity for cruelty. He imparts nothing onto the boys- just more pain and hollowness.
The way people talk here is technically correct, but not quite normal. There’s elements here of some kind of lost hidden New Jersey suburbia, a vacuum outside of space and time. The ending of the story is haunting, as well. I won’t spoil it completely, but there’s a line at the end that reads, “What could ever be harder than feelings?”, and I love that line with my whole heart.
I don’t know why that line stuck with me so intensely on a first reading. Maybe because, after some reflection, it’s true. What is ever harder than feelings? Even in a fantasy game, where none of the stakes, and so technically none of the emotions are real, of course everything is real, if you feel it. Of course actions can only be measured by the way they affect other people. What other metric of relativity do we have to go on? If you say it’s not real, what are you left with? You can only stare down at your empty hands, feeling robbed of something, but unable to articulate that vague sense of injustice. This story, however, is able to convey that feeling perfectly.
Read The Dungeon Master: