The Narrator’s Five Rules for Pursuing Women

The Narrator’s Five Rules for Pursuing Women are the unnamed narrator’s practical code for overcoming hesitation and steering a courtship encounter. He applies them when he approaches Lana after hearing her sing, turning an announced ten-minute absence from Bon into a conversation that continues over the next hour. The rules present romantic pursuit as a sequence of calculated moves, but the scene also shows their limits: Lana’s responses, not the narrator’s method alone, determine whether the encounter advances.

Origin and Immediate Application

The rules emerge from the narrator’s recollection of earlier failures. During his lycée years, he says that thinking too much made him hesitate and then flail and fail when approaching girls. Childhood bullying, in contrast, had toughened him; he came to regard the chance of rejection as preferable to never giving himself the chance. He describes the resulting approach as a form of Zen negation of doubt and fear. The rules are therefore less a general theory of relationships than a method for getting past the first step that he considers the hardest.

The occasion for using that method is unusually charged for him. After Lana finishes singing, the audience claps, whistles, and stomps, while the narrator sits stunned and cannot applaud. As she returns to the performers’ table, he tells Bon he will be back in ten minutes. Bon warns him not to do it, but the narrator crosses the lounge without further thought. Lana’s performance has unsettled his usual composure; the rules supply a procedure for acting before he can retreat into hesitation.

The Five Tactics

The first three rules govern how the narrator begins: “do not ask permission; do not say hello; and do not let her speak first.” He follows them by sitting beside Lana and opening with a remark about not having known she could sing when they first met. Rather than wait for an invitation or begin with a conventional greeting, he chooses the subject and sets the exchange in motion. Lana answers by observing that she had been only sixteen then; he replies that he had been only twenty-five and asks what he knew. The opening establishes that they have met before, while the rules make the narrator responsible for initiating the present conversation.

The fourth rule is to “give a woman the chance to reject something else besides me.” The narrator illustrates it by offering Lana a cigarette. He expects that, if she declines, he can smoke one himself and gain a few seconds to speak while her attention is on the cigarette. Lana instead accepts. He lights it for her, and the narrator treats her acceptance as an opportunity to continue rather than as a conclusion in itself. When he later offers another cigarette, she accepts that one too, takes it from his pack, and waits for him to light it. He regards having made it through two cigarettes as a boost to his confidence. The tactic thus shifts the immediate possibility of refusal onto a small offer, while giving him time to keep the encounter going.

The fifth rule governs how he proposes a change of setting: “statements, not questions, were less likely to lead to no.” After spending an hour talking and hearing Lana sing more songs, he stands when the performer whose chair he has occupied returns and tells Lana, “Let’s go to the bar.” She shrugs and offers him her hand. In the narrator’s account, the statement avoids framing the move as a question that can be declined; Lana’s gesture, however, supplies the affirmative response that actually carries them forward.

Method, Performance, and Limits

Taken together, the rules make pursuit a progression: approach without waiting, begin speaking, introduce a low-stakes offer, and then state the next desired step. The narrator presents that progression with comic confidence, describing his behavior as if it were a practiced discipline. Yet the scene keeps the method attached to his particular nerves and judgments. He recalls earlier embarrassment, relies on cigarettes to create conversational openings, and measures his confidence by Lana’s acceptance of them. The rules organize his conduct; they do not eliminate uncertainty.

The encounter also reveals how much of the method depends on reading Lana rather than merely directing her. She answers his opening, accepts his cigarette, speaks about her parents’ view of singing and dancing, and later offers her hand when he suggests the bar. These actions give the narrator evidence that the conversation is continuing, but they are distinct from his rules and cannot be reduced to them. His own account emphasizes initiative, while Lana’s replies and gestures shape the exchange at every step.

Narrative Significance

The rules are introduced in the middle of a particular romantic approach, so that remembered principle and present action unfold together. The narrator explains the first three just as he sits beside Lana, then names the fourth while offering her a cigarette and the fifth when he proposes going to the bar. This arrangement makes the list function as both retrospective self-description and a running script for the scene. The reader sees not only what the narrator says his method is, but also how he uses it in practice.

The code’s central tension lies in its effort to control the risk of rejection without being able to control Lana’s response. The narrator can choose not to hesitate, offer a cigarette, or phrase an invitation as a statement; he cannot make those actions produce acceptance. In this encounter Lana does accept the cigarettes and offer her hand, allowing the approach to continue. The rules therefore mark a change in the narrator’s behavior—from earlier failure through hesitation to deliberate action—while leaving the relationship itself dependent on an exchange between two people.