Unhappy Endings in The Dungeon Master

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.

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"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.