To give the story a more realistic feel, Gogol even depicts every bit of details of the new overcoat, such as its material, its glossy, attractive texture, and its sturdy quality, as if all aspects of the new overcoat have been carefully examined from Akaky’s perspective within the narration. Gogol describes how Akaky’s frequent visit to the tailor Petrovich and his persistent endurance of months of hardship, with a clear vision of an ultimate goal in his mind, have finally afforded him the luxury of a new overcoat. Through the narrator’s cold, merciless voice, Gogol affirms the indisputable fact that Akaky needs a new overcoat in order to survive the harsh winter and to protect himself from the scornful remarks of his co-workers. Gogol has devoted much of his story to emphasize a new overcoat’s pragmatic appeal for Akaky. The irony of Gogol’s narration arises not only from its mockeries of the old overcoat, but also from its matter-of fact sounding description and its facetious dramatizations of Akaky’s new overcoat. From this point, the narrator reaches the taciturn conclusion that Akaky is so oppressed by society that he even lacks the courage to tell his own story or to write down anything that would resemble it, and as most people surrounding Akaky are ignorant of his diminishing existence, the narrator also questions whether individuals who share Akaky’s suffering will ever be known by their fellow human beings if he did not bother to include any of them in his story.
The narrator characterizes Akaky’s obsession with his copying work as his desperate resort for avoiding any other misfortunes in his life. Moreover, by revealing Akaky’s reluctance to change a document from third person into a letter in first person, the narrator has also attested to the belittling effect that Akaky’s work has produced upon him. Thus from the narrator’s view, Akaky’s hard work only appears to further degrade his life, and therefore it is no better than patching an overcoat with its collar. Within such society, Akaky’s only merit is his neat hand writing, and as the story develops, the narrator suggests that Akaky’s life has become as hopeless as his broken overcoat is, especially when Akaky finds it impossible to compensate for all his inherent disadvantages by working diligently as copying clerk: as this kind of role is nearly negligible within his society, his achievement is usually not recognized. Indeed, as the hemorrhoidal complexion of Akaky’s face reminds the narrator of Akaky’s birth in a humble family, his low rank, and his old age, the narrator exclaims “No help for it!” (Gogol, 1) not simply out of his sympathy for Akaky’s physical appearance, but rather it is because he realizes that in a society which depends virtue upon rank, family influence, and perhaps also upon good physical appearance, there is simply no way for Akaky to advance himself in his life. In “The Overcoat”, such a strange, absolutely “zero-sum” way of tailoring, besides explaining the variegated look and the reduced collar on Akaky’s overcoat, also seems to reflect a pattern that is typical within Akaky’s destitute life.
#WORDUM OVERCOAT PATCH#
The narrator notices Akaky’s overcoat is mocked by others as it is becoming “threadbare” (Gogol, 5), and to prevent it from falling apart, Akaky has to use its collar to patch all other damages on it. To set the tragic tone of the story, Gogol appears to his reader as an omniscient and anonymous third person narrator who observes the parallels between Akaky Akakievich, an impoverished clerk, and his worn-out overcoat, which often represents the image of himself within society. Along those playful exaggerations, however, Gogol also turns the overcoat into a motif that expresses his serious concerns for the well being of humanity, and eventually such concerns also distinguish themselves from all comedies within his tale.
Without loss of humor, he has shown his reader different perceptions of an overcoat as a simple necessity for decent life, an object beyond admiration, a tenuous tie between a man and his “brother” (Gogol, 29), and perhaps worst of all, a cause for the rage of ghosts. In his short tale “The Overcoat,” Nikolai Gogol has unfolded tragedies as well as satirical jokes by imagining a wide range of roles an overcoat can fulfill within an oppressive, bureaucratic, and heavily materialistic society.
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