The Overcoat Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Victor Brombert

Critical Essay by Victor Brombert

"Meaning and Indeterminacy in Gogol's The Overcoat'," in Literary Generations: A Festschrift in Honor of Edward D. Sullivan, edited by Alain Toumayan, French Forum, 1992, pp. 48-54.

Here, the Brombert examines several possible interpretations of "The Overcoat" and argues that Gogol purposely made the story difficult to interpret because he "delighted in verbal acts as a game . . . that implied the autonomy of narrative style" from plot and meaning.

Akaky Akakyevich is the central character of Gogol's story "The Overcoat." Although Dostoevsky gave common currency to the term "anti-hero" in Notes from Underground, it is Gogol's Akaky Akakyevich who is the genuine, unmitigated, and seemingly unredeemable anti-hero. For Dostoevsky's antiheroic paradoxalist, afflicted with hypertrophia of the consciousness, is well-read, cerebral, incurably bookish, and talkative. Akaky Akakyevich is hardly aware, and almost inarticulate. Gogol's artistic wager was to try to articulate this inarticulateness.

The story, in its plot line,...
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