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This article seeks to determine how Carver’s essays shed light on his stories and vice versa. His essays, which include both introspection and theory, expose the metonymic relationship between reality and fiction which is typical of realism. Carver’s essays and stories complete each other : the explicit comments on fiction writing in the former echo the trivialized form of metafiction that appears in the latter. The same words tend to recur in both genres: they are part of an intertextual play which highlights the richness of his work.