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Errand Study Guide

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by Raymond Carver
About 40 pages (12,090 words)
Errand Summary

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Historical Context

Widely considered the father of the short story form, Chekhov was perhaps the biggest literary influence of Carver's life. Critics frequently hail Carver's "Chekhovian" vision and draw attention to the parallels between the two writers' style and subject matter. William Stull, for example, writes, "Like Chekhov, Carver knew intimately the marginal lives of hardship and squalor from which he crafted luminous stories of empathy, endangerment, and hard-won affirmation." It is both fitting and ironic that "Errand" was the last story that Carver wrote before he died. Carver himself says that he was inspired to write the story after reading Troyat's account of Chekhov's death in his biography on the Russian writer. In his essay "On Errand" in No Heroics, Please, Carver writes, "I thought I saw an opportunity to pay homage—if I could bring it off,.....

This is a free excerpt of 135 words. This section contains 560 words. This study guide contains 12,090 words (approx. 40 pages at 300 words per page).

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Errand from BookRags and Gale's For Students Series. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.

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