During the sleigh ride, the important person is filled with happy thoughts and fond memories of the evening that has just passed, even chuckling to himself as he remembers some of his own jokes. However, Gogol is able to rapidly switch genres by acknowledging what he is doing: “But who could imagine that this was not yet all for Akaky Akakievich…? These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol. What words or phrases create the humorous, mocking tone the narrator takes towards Petrovich The tailor and his wife? I'm sorry, what quote means that you have been provided with choices for your answer. We would also need to know the answer to Part A. Stories begin to circulate that the ghost of a clerk is haunting St. Petersburg, stealing overcoats to replace his own stolen coat. In this way, though the disaster of the story is clearly one that happens to Akaky because of his poverty—his coat is stolen and he does not have the money or power to have the theft redressed nor to buy a new coat—it forms part of Gogol’s project of egalitarianism. We cannot help feeling that this was fated to happen all along. The Russian also revels in obsession: two former friends feuding in the courts because one called the other a “goose,” a painter besotted with a prostitute (“Nevsky Prospekt”), and so on. resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel. Because he is too afraid to stop the ghost, he merely follows it, until the dead man turns around and asks “What do you want?” while shaking a terrifying inhuman fist (424). Self-reflexivity continues to be an important feature of the story in this section, as Gogol plays with narrative perspective and genre. Postmodernism, Magic Realism, and "The Overcoat" Notes on “The Overcoat” Postmodernism – Magic Realism.

Earlier the narrator stated that no one in the department could remember who had hired Akaky or when, such that it seemed that he had always been there and everyone began to feel that Akaky had simply been born as he was in that moment, always in the very position he was now in. Instead of seeing or seeking variety in the outside world, the Akaky of the beginning of the story is able to find endless satisfaction and amusement in his extremely banal copying work. "The Overcoat" Part 3 Summary and Analysis. It produces a curious effect—the narrator has claimed to have limited knowledge of Akaky’s interiority, but then produces knowledge that could only be obtained by access to Akaky’s interiority. However, it is at this point that the story takes a strange supernatural twist: “our poor story,” the narrator says, “unexpectedly acquires a fantastic ending” (420). Not affiliated with Harvard College. The Overcoat study guide contains a biography of Nikolai Gogol, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. Akaky demands the important person’s coat, which he hands over in a terrible fright. The next day, his daughter remarks that he looks very pale. He has such a pleasant time and his spirits are so lifted that he decides to visit his mistress that evening instead of returning directly home. Copyright © 1999 - 2020 GradeSaver LLC. N/A. He is almost captured by some policemen, until he vanishes suddenly in a way that makes them question whether they had ever in fact caught him. Most importantly, the coat seems to satisfy Akaky, because the ghost seems to stop appearing, for the most part. With Akaky experiencing a high fever the next day, the doctor comes and concludes that Akaky will be dead within a day and a half. Please include all information in your posts. In this way, he finds out that Akaky had suddenly died of a fever, which only increases his regret. You must know that Akakiy Akakievitch's cloak served as an object of ridicule to the officials: they even refused it the noble name of cloak, and called it a cape.

One could argue that by making these intentionally contradictory statements Gogol is encouraging the reader to be aware of claims to truth and authority made by narrators: to think critically about what narrators know in telling a story and why writers make these choices. Within a day there is a new clerk in Akaky’s place, a clerk who is much taller and writes in a slanted script. However, every now and then, a strong gale of wind hits him apparently out of nowhere. The way that we interact with other human beings is, however, clearly subjective, with each person only able to guess or speculate how another person may be feeling—things that the narrator, despite seeming at times to be an omniscient one, also does in this story. It is unclear whether Akaky hears these words and what effect they may have on him.

His possessions are not even sealed up, since Akaky has no inheritors, and in any case the possessions are very meager. Active Themes When he recovers, Akaky runs to the watchman in the middle of the square. It is in this way that the office learns that Akaky has died, and already been buried three days. Likewise, in the same way, the narrator’s eulogy of a kind for Akaky recalls the image previously given of Akaky as no more important in the caretakers’ eyes than a fly buzzing through the room. He thought of Akaky with some remorse every day for a week, before finally sending a clerk to see if he could help Akaky after all. As if to make up for having lived unnoticed by anyone, Akaky becomes an extremely conspicuous figure in death. Up until the ending, it is not a supernatural story, though as we discussed in Part 1 Gogol foreshadows this ending by discussing how the young clerk is metaphorically haunted by a vision of Akaky. Akaky walks outside in a daze, buffeted on all sides by a vicious St. Petersburg blizzard, wandering with his mouth gaping. This reinforces the argument, discussed in the analysis in Part 3, that Gogol employs self-reflexivity not just to be clever or funny.

The saga of the rise and fall of Akaky’s overcoat initially represents a euphoric turn, but it quickly turns to tragedy, raising the question of whether Gogol is suggesting that it would have been better if Akaky had never been disturbed at all. Despite this statement, the narrator then proceeds to describe in great detail the visions experienced by the delirious Akaky, visions to which the narrator could have access only by being inside the mind of the incoherent Akaky: he sees Petrovich, who he asks to make another coat with booby traps for thieves; he imagines thieves to be under the bed; he sees his old housecoat hanging in front of him; then he sees the general, and curses him out. View UC15lg7q_8MngfhxOx3a6M1A’s profile on YouTube. Rather, it facilitates Gogol’s conscious play with literary conventions and styles. Throughout the story, Gogol repeatedly emphasizes that difficulty can befall everyone, no matter their status: the narrator describes Akaky as someone “upon whom disaster then fell as unbearably as it falls upon the kings and rulers of this world…” (420). “The Nose” features a petty bureaucrat, whose nose vanishes overnight, only to reappear dressed up and riding a carriage around town, yet no spectator recognizes it for a nose—modernist surrealism evocative of a Dali painting. Gogol is where Russian literature soared to earth. Many elements—including the anonymous “everyman” nature of the character Akaky and the “fantastic” reappearance of his corpse near the end—give the story a … Third-person omniscient narrators know, as the term implies, everything about all characters, including their innermost thoughts. “Whether Akaky Akakievich heard these fatal words spoken,” the narrator says, as if the words themselves will kill Akaky, “and, if he heard them, whether they made a tremendous effect on him, whether he regretted his wretched life—none of this is known, because he was in fever and delirium the whole time” (419). From the beginning “The Overcoat” combines elements of exaggerated, even slapstick satire with degrees of social realism. Policemen become “so afraid of dead men” that they become “wary of seizing living ones,” instead shouting from a distance, “Hey, you, on your way!” (421).

Best of all is The Government Inspector, in which bribe-fattened town bureaucrats mistake a journeying prat for an anti-corruption inspector and shower him with gifts and attentions—a harsh satire on Tsarist Russia’s rampant bribery and hypocrisy but also a hilarious send-up of the gullible, infallibly silly nature of man. “The Overcoat” is a Melvillian fable of a poor clerk whose purpose in life is to buy a new overcoat, only for it to be stolen—the tale models Gogol’s magical realism: destitution, mental anguish, and bureaucratic tyranny (realism) blended with surreal or … The overcoat seemed to give Akaky a sense of purpose and value in life, and even to make him into a more complete human being, but now that has been snatched away from him. The Overcoat essays are academic essays for citation. He does, the narrator tell us, have feverish visions, all centering around his coat. St. Petersburg is left, the narrator tells us, without Akaky Akakievich, as if he had never been there.