“Everything is a delusion, everything is a dream, everything is not what it seems!”
The author tries to show the real nature of our world, of humankind. Reading the story, we see that beauty of a body doesn’t always mean beauty and purity of a soul. Gogol calls the reader not to judge things by their appearance, because it’s often deceptive and misleading. The author asks himself, and ourselves as well, if we get those things that we want to have? Whether we achieve those things, what our forces seem to be purposely prepared to? And Gogol answers at once, that it always happens the other way around.
Man is so wonderful creature that no one can ever count all of his advantages, and the more you peer into him, the more of new features appear and a description of them would be endless.
On the examples of the heroes of the story, Pirogov, Piskarev and others, Gogol shows us that a man’s soul, his inner world can’t ever be fully known. When we think we know someone, we just actually know this person’s shell, or some features in this shell, but not all of them. Man’s soul may be compared with the universe. The more we discover it, the more we realize that it’s impossible to open it fully, that it’s endless. And only fools say that they know everything about the world (universe). The same situation is with a man’s soul.
