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Gogol's “Overcoat”: The Pathetic Passages Reconsidered

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Judith Oloskey Mills
Judith Oloskey Mills*
Affiliation:
Fordham University, New York, New York
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Abstract

Although twentieth-century Formalist criticism has concentrated upon stylistic analysis of “The Overcoat” and its skaz narrative technique, no previous study has focused directly upon another aspect of skaz—the influence of the narrator on the structure of the story and the pathetic passages. This aspect is essential to reconcile the juxtaposition of humor and pathos. The narrator, a creator of fiction, constructs a plot based on a moral principle: excessive self-confidence receives retribution. As evidenced in his tendency to satirize, the narrator is as guilty of this same self-confidence as his characters. Fearing similar retribution, he rejects responsibility for his satiric creation by limiting his omniscient point of view and placing the blame for negative portrayals on his objective depiction of reality. In true skaz style his own attitude, expressed in plot, point of view, and his own pathetic passage, is superimposed oh his characters, resulting in the first most quoted passage and in minor variations of it.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 89 , Issue 5 , October 1974 , pp. 1106 - 1111
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1974

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References

Note 1 in page 1111 An earlier version of this paper was read at the Northeast MLA Conference, Philadelphia, 3 April 1971.

Note 2 in page 1111 In both Aleksandr L. Slonimskij, Texnika komiceskogo u Gogolja (1923; rpt. Brown Univ. Reprint Series, No. 2, Providence: Brown Univ. Press, 1963), p. 18, and Vladimir V. Ermilov, ?. V. Gogol‘ (Moscow: Sovetskij pisatel’, 1952), pp. 174–79, the stress is on the pathetic passages as conveyers of the story's moral impulse.

Note 3 in page 1111 Grigorij A. Gukovskij, Realizm Gogolja (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo xudozestvennoj literatury, 1959), p. 353.

Note 4 in page 1111 Gogol as a Short Story Writer (The Hague: Mouton, 1965), pp. 187, 186.

Note 5 in page 1111 This is the supposition in the critique made by Nikolaj L. Stepanov, ?. V. Gogol': Tvorceskij put' (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo xudozestvennoj literatury, 1955), p. 275.

Note 6 in page 1111 Legenda ? velikom Inkvizitore F. M. Dostoevskogo, 3rd ed. (St. Petersburg: Izdanie M. V. Pirizkova, 1906), p. 278.

Note 7 in page 1111 Boris M. Èjxenbaum, “Kak sdelana ‘Sinel’ ‘ Gogolja,” Skvoz’ literatury (The Hague: Mouton, 1962), pp. 188–91.

Note 8 in page 1111 This is a basic definition taken from Boris V. Toma-sevskij, Teorija literatury:Poètika (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo, 1927), p. 192.

Note 9 in page 1111 Hugh McLean, “On the Style of Leskovian Skaz,” Harvard Slavic Studies, 2 (1954), 200–300.

Note 10 in page 1111 Hongor Oulanoff, The Serapion Brothers (The Hague: Mouton, 1966), pp. 87–88.

Note 11 in page 1111 Cyzevskyj, “O ‘Sineli’ Gogolja,” Sovremennye zapiski, 67 (1938), 173; Baumgarten, “Gogol's ‘Overcoat’ as a Picaresque Epic,” Dalhousie Review, 46, No. 2 (1966), 194.

Note 12 in page 1111 James B. Woodward, “The Threadbare Fabric of Gogol's Overcoat,' ” Canadian Slavic Studies, 1 (Spring 1967), 98. Woodward does a stylistic study in the EjKen-baum tradition of Gogol's “ephemeral” language.

Note 13 in page 1111 ?. V. Gogol', Sobranie xudozestvennyx proizvedenij v pjati tomax (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1960), in, 185, 189–90. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text.

Note 14 in page 1111 Gogol (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1969), p. 153.

Note 15 in page 1111 Ocerki po analizu tvorcestva ?. V. Gogolja (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo, ca. 1920, p. 22.