Summary
Akaky walks outside in a daze, buffeted on all sides by a vicious St. Petersburg blizzard, wandering with his mouth gaping. In this way he immediately catches quinsy, a rare complication of tonsillitis. 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. The doctor tells the landlady to order Akaky a pine coffin immediately. It is unclear whether Akaky hears these words and what effect they may have on him. He does, the narrator tell us, have feverish visions, all centering around his coat. Akaky asks Petrovich in his delirium to make an overcoat with snares for thieves, and imagines that the thieves are under his bed. He sees the general before him, to whom he apologizes profusely, before cursing him out in the kind of language the landlady has never heard Akaky speak before. Eventually Akaky speaks complete gibberish, and finally dies. His possessions are not even sealed up, since Akaky has no inheritors, and in any case the possessions are very meager. St. Petersburg is left, the narrator tells us, without Akaky Akakievich, as if he had never been there. “Vanished and gone was that being, protected by no one, dear to no one, interesting to no one, who had not attracted the attention of a naturalist—who does not fail to stick a pin through a common fly and examine it under a microscope” (419).
Several days after Akaky’s death, a caretaker is sent to his apartment to summon him to the workplace immediately. It is in this way that the office learns that Akaky has died, and already been buried three days. 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, 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). As if to make up for having lived unnoticed by anyone, Akaky becomes an extremely conspicuous figure in death. Stories begin to circulate that the ghost of a clerk is haunting St. Petersburg, stealing overcoats to replace his own stolen coat. This ghost steals all kinds of coats from all kinds of people, “regardless of rank or title” (420). An absurd order is issued to the police to “catch the dead man at all costs, dead or alive” (420). 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. 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)
The narrator returns to the “important person” from earlier in the story, who, after all, set in motion the chain of events leading to Akaky’s death. After Akaky left his office, the important person in fact began to feel pangs of regret. 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. In this way, he finds out that Akaky had suddenly died of a fever, which only increases his regret. Hoping to distract himself from this unpleasantness, he goes to a friend’s house for the evening, where he finds plenty of company who thankfully are of “nearly the same rank,” making him feel more at ease in his conduct (422). 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. 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, every now and then, a strong gale of wind hits him apparently out of nowhere. Finally, the important person suddenly feels someone grab him by the collar, and realizes with horror that it is Akaky Akakievich. Akaky demands the important person’s coat, which he hands over in a terrible fright. He orders his driver to take him home immediately instead of to his mistress’ house. The next day, his daughter remarks that he looks very pale. The important person does not disclose what has happened to him, but he does begin to act more compassionately to subordinates at work.
Most importantly, the coat seems to satisfy Akaky, because the ghost seems to stop appearing, for the most part. However, others say that the dead clerk still appears “in the more remote parts of the city” (424). Indeed, one policeman in Kolomna sees the ghost appear from behind a house. 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). The policeman responds, “Nothing,” and turns back around (424). The ghost, now much larger, with “an enormous mustache,” disappears into the night (424).
Analysis
Self-reflexivity continues to be an important feature of the story in this section, as Gogol plays with narrative perspective and genre. One example is when Akaky falls into a fever and the doctor tells Akaky’s landlady to buy a coffin immediately as he has at most a day and a half to live. “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). 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. 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.
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. Third-person omniscient narrators know, as the term implies, everything about all characters, including their innermost thoughts. 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. Another moment of self-reflexivity is Gogol’s acknowledgement of his play with genre conventions. From the beginning “The Overcoat” combines elements of exaggerated, even slapstick satire with degrees of social realism. Though Akaky as an individual seems too absurd and pitiful to be true—such as, for example, the fact that he is always walking under windows right as people are throwing trash out of them—the story also, in its portrayal of Akaky’s poverty and need to budget scrupulously, presents a dimension of social realism. 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. 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…? Yet so it happened, and our poor story unexpectedly acquires a fantastic ending” (420). This reinforces the argument, discussed in the analysis in Part 3, that Gogol employs self-reflexivity not just to be clever or funny. Rather, it facilitates Gogol’s conscious play with literary conventions and styles.
With Akaky’s death, Gogol brings the story full circle back to where it began. 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. Now that Akaky is dead, the opposite is true: “Petersburg was left without Akaky Akakievich, as if he had never been there” (419). 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. Akaky, the narrator states, was “dear to no one, interesting to no one… had not even attracted the attention of a naturalist—who does not fail to stick a pin through a common fly and examine it under a microscope” (419). Here, Akaky is not even on the same level as a fly. And yet, to a degree, a statement like this one—that Akaky was “interesting to no one”—is ironic, because Gogol has decided that he is interesting, and has sought to make him interesting to the reader by writing this story. 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. 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)
In light of how the story ends, it might seem, as Simon Karlinsky suggests, that Gogol is articulating an essentially conservative worldview in this story (143). Akaky is very happy as a copying clerk. He does not desire advancement in his job nor seem to resent his circumstances, even though he has little money and must budget scrupulously in order to make ends meet. 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 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.
