The Chaser

The Chaser is a very short story, just over a thousand words long. We learn little about the two central characters in the story; neither Alan Austen nor the unnamed proprietor of the shabby little store that acts as the story’s singular setting are fully realized characters. The products the older man sells have no name, and neither does his store. This is all just as well, as we, the readers, have entered Collier’s realm of the ironic parable, in which universal human truths are exchanged between people who could be anyone, speaking at any time, and in any place.

Despite the universalism of the story, Collier injects it with mystery and magic. It is uncanny, for instance, that the proprietor knows Alan Austen’s name before being proffered a card with the young man’s name on it. Furthermore, the animating object behind the story, a love potion, is an artifact that wouldn’t be out of place in a fairy tale. Yet the practical facts of business undercut the enigmatic magic: the love potion has a comprehensive and unambiguous physical effect, and within the story, there is no doubt that it works. The old man has the authority of God, or of the writer himself.

The ironic twist of the story, of course, is that the youthful passion for love inevitably becomes, over time, a demand for freedom from love’s constraints—a fact the old man knows, but Alan Austen does not. The price of not knowing this is the price of the solution—death—or $5,000.

Collier’s (or at least, the proprietor’s) conservative vision does not allow that that our perception of romantic love should be reformed, or that old age should take on the responsibility to prewarn and teach the young about the perils along their pathway. The universalism of the story is also a fatalism. Collier seems to argue that love has always been this way, and that it has always been the prerogative of the old to prey upon the young.