THE OVERCOAT

THE OVERCOAT 

Intro to writer:            Nikolay Gogol, in full Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol   (born March 19 [March 31, New Style], 1809, Sorochintsy, near Poltava, Ukraine, Russian Empire [now in Ukraine]—died February 21 [March 4], 1852, Moscow, Russia), Ukrainian-born Russian humorist, dramatist, and novelist, whose novel Myortvye dushi (Dead Souls) and whose short story “Shinel” (“The Overcoat”) are considered the foundations of the great 19th-century tradition of Russian realism.

Plot Summary:

• We begin with a certain official. A low-ranking one. An ugly one. One with the name equivalent of Poopy McPooper-son. Our protagonist Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin.
• Now we know what you're thinking: No one in their right mind would name their child after poop. But really, his mom had no other choice because the names his godparents chose just didn't sound right, whatever kind of excuse that is.
• So she named him after his dad, Akaky. And since -evich is the Russian version of -son, he became Akaky Akakievich. Totally reasonable.
• As far as anybody knows, Akaky was born in his uniform and had been an official ever since, Benjamin Button-style. Despite that, Akaky gets no respect. People act like he's not even there, and the younger officials make fun of him. None of this matters to Akaky, however, since he loves his job so much.
• One day, the younger officials stop Akaky from doing his work, and he yells at them to leave him alone. This blows one of the young official's minds, and from that day forward, he can never forget how inhumanely he treated Akaky. Did it get deep in here or is it just us?
• Anyway, back to Akaky. He loves his job, and even though he's basically a human Xerox machine, he treats his job like it's the best thing since sliced bread.
• He is totally content with his situation, even refusing a slightpromotion from one of his directors. For him, it's copying or nothing.
• When everyone else is out partying, eating, or having fun, Akaky is in his room copying papers. And he probably would have continued doing this for the rest of his life if he weren't so unlucky.
• Akaky lives in St. Petersburg, which is known for its crazy cold winters. Everyone in the city has to deal with the cold, but it's worse for people like Akaky who don't have enough money to buy a fancy warm coat. It's hard out there for a… human printer, in Akaky's case.
• Akaky owns an overcoat but he starts noticing that he feels cold in his back and shoulders on the way to work.
• One day, he suddenly realizes that his coat is basically a pile of rags. Of course, everyone else knew that already and even made fun of him for it, but Akaky is normally too busy copying letters to notice. This man's work ethic is something to admire, that's for sure.
• So he brings the coat to his tailor, Petrovich. Petrovich is not the kind of guy that we would choose to be our tailor. He drinks all the time, argues with his wife, can't seem to thread a needle, and on top of all that, he's angry. Not a good recipe.
• Akaky hopes that Petrovich could just patch his coat a bit for only a couple of rubles, but no such luck. The coat is so old that it's literally falling apart. Petrovich isn't going near it.
• It's time for a new coat, but Akaky doesn't have the money. A new coat would cost 150 rubles, and that's just the basic model.
• When Akaky leaves Petrovich, he's in a daze. He doesn't even notice that trash is dumped on his head and he gets covered in soot.
• By the time he gets home Akaky calms down and thinks of a plan. He'll go back to Petrovich on Sunday, when he's still a little drunk and sleepy. That should work.
• Fast forward to Sunday, and Akaky is back at Petrovich's shop. Unfortunately, Akaky is very unlucky, and as soon as he mentions the overcoat, Petrovich snaps out of his hangover. He's not budging. Akaky has to get a new coat, no if's, and's, or but's.
• Like we said before, Akaky's problem is that he has no money. Even though it's still pretty expensive for him, Akaky manages to negotiate Petrovich down to 80 rubles.
• He already had 40 rubles saved up, so Akaky just lives a very simple and very cold life until he can get the other 40.
• Next, something out of the ordinary happens. Akaky decides to get the coat made, and even though he's kind of anxious, he looks forward to it. So much so that he makes a mistake in his work for the first time ever. This is the guy who even copies papers in his spare time.
• Then when it's time for Akaky's raise, he hits the jackpot. Instead of 40 rubles, he gets 60! Looks like it's coat o'clock for Akaky, no more frigid walks home in the cold Russian winter.
• They go to the store, get the best materials they can afford, and Petrovich works for two weeks making the coat. When it's done, he goes to Akaky and presents it to him like it's the royal jewels. It's the best day of Akaky's life.
• But then he gets to work. Everyone hears the news and starts complimenting him.
• At first he likes all the attention, but pretty soon it all becomes too much. He even starts saying that it's not a new coat at all, but to no avail. By the end of the day he's forced into going to a party to celebrate his new coat.
• The guy throwing the party for Akaky's coat lives in the nice part of St. Petersburg, somewhere really far away from Akaky's house. So to get there, he has to walk forever across the dark, frozen city.
• As he gets closer to the nice neighborhood, he sees all of these beautiful clothes and advertisements that he has never seen before in his life.
• When he finally gets to this guy's house the party is already raging. Akaky acts just like you'd expect someone who's never been to a party to act: crazy awkward. Like a cow on a crutch.
• Even though the party is showing no signs of stopping, once midnight rolls around Akaky decides it's his bedtime and leaves without telling anyone.
• Akaky's still got a skip in his step on his long walk home until he arrives at his neighborhood. The sketchy neighborhood. As you probably guessed, he gets mugged in the street and his coat is stolen. He even faints.
• When he regains consciousness, Akaky screams bloody murder. He goes to the night watchman, but he's no help. He says to talk to the captain in the morning.
• Akaky goes home a mess. His hair is in disarray and he's covered in snow…definitely not a good look.
• When the landlady sees him, she's shocked. After he tells her what happened to him, she suggests that he go straight to the superintendent, because the captain probably won't do anything to help.
• So, that's exactly what poor, coatless Akaky does, but not without difficulty. At first, the superintendent's clerks don't let him in. They only cave when he threatens to report them, but even then, when he talks to the superintendent it seems like he's the one being questioned instead of being helped.
• All this makes Akaky pretty depressed. He doesn't even go to work, which is a pretty big deal knowing how much he loves his job. When he goes in the next day, he wears his old sloppy coat, and while lots of people feel bad for him, others still make fun of him and no one really helps.
• One guy tells him that he has to go speak to "a certain prominent personage." We don't know who this prominent personage is, or what he does, but Akaky decides to go see him anyway.
• This seems like a horrible idea for a couple of reasons: 1) this mystery man seems to be obsessed with making himself seem prominent, 2) he only makes himself seem prominent by being strict and mean, and 3) he is even stricter and meaner to low-ranking people like Akaky. This isn't going to be pretty.
• By the time that Akaky finally gets to talk to this certain "prominent personage," the dude is really in the mood to show off how mean he can be. It must be hard being so prominent.
• By just coming to his office, Akaky has somehow insulted him. He yells at Akaky, who stands silently and doesn't even know what to say. This guy continues to lay into Akaky so hard that our sad, coatless hero faints yet again.
• By the time Akaky wakes up, he has no idea what's going on. He walks home in the terrible St. Petersburg winter without a coat and ends up developing quinsy, an infection of the throat that swells until you can't breathe.
• The prognosis is not good. He'll be dead in less than two days.
• After developing the infection, Akaky turns into a different man. He's delusional and raves in his sleep about the overcoat. He even curses, which he's never done in his life. Then, he finally dies.
• Akaky doesn't leave anything behind. The guys at his work don't even know he's dead until they ask why he hasn't come in lately. Once they learn of Akaky's fate, they promptly replace him with someone else.
• The end.
• Suddenly, there's a rumor around town that a ghost has started appearing at night and stealing people's coats right off their backs. The police try to catch him, but (duh) he's a ghost.
• Then there's that "prominent personage," the guy who yelled at Akaky and made him faint. After everything that happened, he starts to feel bad about what he did to Akaky. By the time he tries to help him, however, Akaky is already dead. Talk about too little too late.
• To take his mind off of how horribly he treated a cold, sad, and now deceased man, the prominent personage goes to a party and then pays a visit to a certain lady friend. The sort of visit that you might call adultery, but, hey, who are we to judge.
• Everything's going great until suddenly, the personage feels something around his collar. It's Akaky, and he wants the dude's coat.
• Akaky grabs the coat, and the prominent personage escapes in his carriage as fast as he can, we imagine with his tail tucked between his legs. It's not every day you get jumped by a ghost, after all. Instead of going to see his lady friend, he goes straight home and is so freaked out that he won't tell anyone what happened.
• A curious thing happens after this event, however: the personage starts to act less like a jerk. More importantly, the ghost is gone. We guess the personage's coat fit Akaky perfectly.
• Even after Akaky's reign of terror ends, people keep seeing ghosts. But they definitely aren't Akaky, since they are too tall, too huge, and too mustachioed. Who was it? Maybe we'll never know.

THEMEs

POLITICS

Nope, we're not talking about Democrats and Republicans here. We're talking about ranks. Titular councilors, Collegiate Assessors, Chancellors, and the whole nine yards. The world of "The Overcoat" is awash in governmental officials. Everyone has to tread carefully in order not to offend the people above and below them. Why is this so important? We don't know. But we do know that the rules of politics are strong enough in "The Overcoat" to cause one man's death.

DISSATISFACTION

We can't get no satisfaction. In most Western societies, dissatisfaction is a good thing. Except, rather than calling it dissatisfaction, we call it ambition. In "The Overcoat," however, ambition isn't all it's cracked up to be. All around Akaky, other officials jostle with one another for higher ranks. He's the only one who is fine with his low status, but everyone looks down on him because of it. It's not until later that we realize he's the only person who's actually happy in the story, but that all changes when he becomes like everyone else. So in the world of "The Overcoat," there are two choices: be happy, poor, and disrespected, or be unhappy, rich, and powerful.

ISOLATION

One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do. It's no fun to be alone and have no friends. Or at least that's what most of us think. Akaky, on the other hand, would probably think otherwise. When he's alone, he's perfectly content and his life has no problems. It's only when he starts becoming popular because of his new overcoat that everything changes. Even though he has new friends, they aren't very genuine because they are only interested in his stuff. In "The Overcoat," Gogol reminds us that sometimes it's better to be alone than to have fake friends.

SUPERNATURAL

Ghosts are scary. Everyone knows that. But why are ghosts scary, especially ones with a relatively harmless appetite for coats? Even though Akaky the Ghost obviously isn't out to kill anybody, everyone freaks out about him anyway…but why? Seriously, how terrifying can a ghost be when all it does is take your coat? The chilling part of Akaky's ghost isn't that he might take your coat, it's that he doesn't care about a person's rank; he treats them all equally. And in a society that is obsessed with the social hierarchy, the idea of an equal-opportunity haunting is a very frightening thing indeed.

Characters:

Grigorii Petrovich, the Tailor

                                                   

Jerkwad, A Certain Prominent Personage

Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin kaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, the impoverished clerk and protagonist of the story, is one of the first appearances in modern literature of the “little man”—the poor, meek soul overwhelmed by dehumanizing forces in an increasingly technological and bureaucratized society. In introducing him, the story’s narrator describes him as “a clerk of whom it cannot be said that he was very remarkable.”

Akaky is a short, balding man with a bad complexion whose world seems to be defined by the tedious and solitary job of copying the various trivial documents he is given by his superiors. He has performed this work for uncounted years in an unspecified governmental department in St. Petersburg, even taking it home to complete at night. The prospect of a promotion that might give him the simplest editorial responsibility fills him with such fear that he once told a superior, “No, I’d rather copy something.” A passive person, Akaky usually responds to the constant teasing of his coworkers by silently carrying on with his work and pretending that nothing is happening.

When he finds himself thrust into the center of attention after buying himself a new winter coat, the self-effacing clerk actually begins to feel a sense of pride. His newfound ability to assert himself is intensified after the coat is stolen: in trying to report the crime and seek restitution, as the narrator comments, “Akaky Akakievich for the first time in his life tried to show the strength of his character.” In the end, however, this test of character overwhelms him, and his personality disintegrates. Akaky becomes incoherent and dies more or less as a result of a “severe reprimand” that he receives from the General. The final image we have of him is that of a walking corpse, for in death he finally obtains some of the justice that eluded him in life.

 

Setting:

 St. Petersburg, the city established by Czar Peter the Great in an attempt to make 18th-century Russia more like Amsterdam. As the imperial capital of Russia, the city was teeming with officials just like Akaky, but that's not what Gogol tells us is important to the story. Instead, it's the weather. The narrator says:

At the hour when the foreheads of even those who occupy exalted positions ache with the cold, and tears start to their eyes, the poor titular councilors are sometimes unprotected. Their only salvation lies in traversing as quickly as possible, in their thin little overcoats, five or six streets, and then warming their feet well in the porter's room, and so thawing all their talents and qualifications for official service, which had become frozen on the way. (17)

In other words, it's freezing!

The average temperature of St. Petersburg in the winter is 12°F. In 1883 it even hit a record low of -25.6°F. No wonder Akaky got so sick when he went home without his coat. At those temperatures he could literally freeze to death in the streets. In some other countries it might be silly to write a whole story about a coat, but it's obvious that in St. Petersburg owning a good overcoat is a big deal.

Narrator

Though not directly involved in the events of the story, the narrator is a very strong—and controversial—presence. The ambiguous picture of the narrator that emerges through his many digressions poses some of the most important interpretive dilemmas in the story: How closely should the narrator be identified with Gogol? What is the narrator’s attitude toward the other characters in the story?

The narrator’s point of view could be described as omniscient or authorial because it is privy to more information than any other character in the story and has access to the characters’ innermost thoughts and feelings