Errand raymond carver summary free#
3 The free indirect style that becomes increasingly dominant in parts three and four develops this polyphony, gradually establishing a second narative voice and a second story.ģAll voices in “Errand” speak of Chekhov, of course, telling of his serious hemoptysis of 22 March 1897 and his painful death on the night of the 2 July 1904. To put the matter more poetically, there is a discreet polyphony. Rather, there is a constant intertextual contamination, the strains of which we may or may not manage to distinguish. There is no single, unifying voice, such as that of an extradiegetic narrator who alone controls the narrative. These voices express themselves in the direct style of letters or spoken words, in the past-tense narration of memoirs, and in the present-tense narration of diaries or newspapers.
Different genres are also mixed (diary, memoir, letter, and press release), and different voices run through the hypertext. It takes root in a hypothetical and nonexistent combination of documents that contaminate each other without leaving traces. Thus, the story proves unstable and uncertain at its core. The hypotext stems from many sources of information: Suvorin’s and Tolstoy’s diaries, Marie Chekhov’s and Olga Knipper’s memoirs, Chekhov’s words as reported by different people, and the various biographies Carver may have consulted, notably Henry Troyat’s Chekhov. It remains implicit or fictive, since no single, identifiable text can be found, as well as multiple.
3 The narrator's comment about the basis of Suvorin and Chekhov’s friendship (“Like Chekhov, he was t (.)ĢThe hypotext of “Errand” is to be found in and between the lines of the text, contingent on the reader’s perspicacity. 2 In this way, he prompts readers to interrogate the very realism that critics have called the main attribute (or major defect) of his work. By shifting from hypotext to hypertext, from one narrative level to the other, from the imaginary story to the illusion of reality, Carver for the first time in his career experiments with the richness and complexity of narrative performance and inscribes into his text the fragile boundaries that separate the real from the imaginary. She also moves him in space, from the hotel bedroom to the street and thence to the mortician’s house. She moves her protagonist, a young bellboy, through time, from the prospective conditional (“would”), to the narrative past, and finally to the present. The episode is a temporal “bubble” that soon turns spatial when Olga becomes the narrator and develops her own story within the story. Chekhov is dead, and the scene the following day that brings together Olga Knipper and the young bellboy, whom she requests to go fetch a mortician, constitutes an unlikely development. 1 These episodes become increasingly detailed, and the last part of the story (there are four parts) has no connection at all with what seemed to be the subject and its treatment at the beginning. The writer’s work on the implicit hypotext fictionalizes the biographical facts, to which he adds imaginary episodes. 
The story initially presents itself as a conventional biographical narrative (covering the illness and death of Chekhov), but it is soon transformed by excisions, extensions, and expansions. The usual characters and themes are not to be found, nor are the settings, nor even is the so-called minimalist narrative mode or style. This (.)ġ “Errand” is an altogether surprising short story among the works of Raymond Carver.
2 When a narrative is embedded in another narrative, it may be said to unfold on a second level. 1 Gérard Genette calls the hypertext any text derived from a previous one by transformation or imita (.). His ordinary everyday gesture, delineated and framed as in a superrealist painting, appears inevitable. The Chekhovian bellboy will have the last word as he bends over to retrieve the cork of the champagne bottle. And when a character becomes the narrator of an imaginary second narrative that reshuffles the items of the first narrative, readers no longer know whether the created scene in the present tense has come to “real” life or whether they are being deceived by the staging of a fake reality. Excisions, extensions, and the addition of more and more detailed imaginary episodes make it difficult to discriminate between the reality of Chekhov's life and the fiction in the story. Everything in Carver’s last story revolves around the notion of realism.From the objective biographical data of the implicit hypotext to the subjectively determined fictive hypertext, the shift is sometimes puzzling. “Errand” has much more to do with Chekhov as a writer than with his last days and death.
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