Semansky is an instructor of English literature and composition and writes regularly on American literature and culture. In this essay, he explores how Carver's short story relates to the concepts of originality and literature.

A realist who shunned wordplay and the cerebral antics of fiction writers such as Donald Barthelme and John Barth and who claimed that he sought emotional truth in his writing, Carver seems an unlikely candidate to have written a story that could so easily be considered postmodern, but "Errand" is precisely that. For like so much postmodern art and literature, it questions the very idea of originality upon which modern western notions of art and literature are based by questioning its own authority. Carver says that he wrote the story as homage to Chekhov, a way of honoring someone whose own writing has meant so much to him. Precisely how it honors Chekhov...