Chinua Gogol 's Dead Souls

The interrelationship between “The Overcoat,” written by Nikolai Gogol, and “Gogol,” written by Jhumpa Lahiri, may not be apparent at first, but with the help of “My Two Lives,” also written by Jhumpa Lahiri, one can see that both “The Overcoat” and “Gogol” are connected by ties that hold them together. Although Gogol and the speaker in “My Two Lives” share similar backgrounds and can directly relate to each other, Akaky can also connect to Lahiri and Gogol because all they all yearn for acceptance from those around them. One point of comparison is the practice of naming connects Akaky, from “The Overcoat”, and Gogol together by having similar practices. Another similarity between all three works is that each main character questions their identity, eventually overcoming their struggle of being seen as different.

. The relationship between Moushumi and Gogol is driven by Moushumi’s desire which is greater even than Gogol’s own, to confirm to a certain image of a modern American. She and Gogol never seem to relax into the idea that they might find their identity in one another and visit to dinner parties with her friends in Brooklyn where Gogol feels awkward and uncomfortable. And this signal a division between them. Moushomi’s dissatisfaction with the marriage eventually leads to her unfaithfulness towards her husband which later leads to divorce and separation between them. Their need of independence and satisfaction is much greater than their sense of loyalty or commitment to each other and find their identity.

Yet Moushumi is the only one who is involved with his family and can fully understand Gogol. He looks for ways to escape the pieces in his life that he dislikes which makes him seem eccentric to the rest of the society he lives in. While Moushumis relationship is imperative with Gogol, Maxine gives him closure, the ability to experience the life he may actually have wanted to grow up in America, while it lasts, ”Quickly, he falls in love with Maxine, the house, and Gerald and Lydia's manner of living, for to know her and love her is to know and love all these things. He loves the mess that surrounds her Maxine, her hundreds of things always covering her floor and her bedside table, her habit when they are alone on the fifth floor, of not shutting the door when she goes to the bathroom. Her unkempt ways, a challenge to his increasingly minimalist taste, charm him”(137). The author utilizes an ample amount of detail in this passage to describe what he loves about his relationship and what lured him to Maxine even more; however, I feel Gogol admires this part about his relationship with Maxine because her lifestyle is not as strict as his or Moushumi’s. This girl had a great amount of freedom and he embraced what he didn’t and couldn’t like he does with her and her family have in his

After his divorce, which is a second difficult experience in his life, Gogol spends time with his family, specifically at a party his mother is hosting before she leaves for India, which again influences him to accept his Bengali culture. At this party, Gogol explores his old house and finds the copy of The Overcoat that his father once gave to him, which makes him realize that “without people in the world to call him Gogol, no matter how long he himself lives, Gogol Ganguli will, once and for all, vanish from the lips of loved ones, and so, cease to exist” (Lahiri 433). In college and when he was Maxine, going by Nikhil gives Gogol a newfound perspective in his life, one where being shameful of his name does not really exist. However, after going through both his father’s death and his divorce, Gogol feels upset when thinking about how he changed his name, which “provides no solace at all” (433). With most of his family and Moushumi gone, few people are left to call him Gogol, reminding him who he once was. Gogol’s sadness shows how he has become comfortable with his birth name, which he originally hated. Through his reading of The Overcoat and his reflection on the possible nonexistence of his life as Gogol, Gogol accepts both his name and his culture, which ultimately shows how he becomes comfortable with

In Gogol’s “The Overcoat”, an every man apparently becomes something more by replacing his overcoat. In Gogol’s “The Nose”, a man is temporarily reduced to nothing upon literally losing his nose. In both texts, the interplay of dreams and reality serve to highlight Gogol’s issues with the fabric of Russian society and personal identity by creating unconventional narration, a dynamic perspective, and characterization.

I believe that a very prominent theme in this story is the struggles in society relating to classes. One of the things that Gogol most often points out is the dress and ranking of the characters in this story. For instance, the barber Ivan Yakovlevitch is described as a very dirty man who does not care about his appearance, probably emphasizing his lower class ranking. Kopek is described as very well dressed and has a somewhat higher ranking of “Major.” Meanwhile, when he spots his nose masquerading as a very high ranked man, it is dressed exquisitely. The nose draws envy of everyone with its appearance and apparent rank. The ludicrousness of a nose causing envy and admiration and fear in people, even in Kopek who owns it, really emphasizes how ridiculous Gogol perceives the class system to be.

From the start the novel is laden with the pressures that the main characters are exposed to due to their social inequality, unlikeness in their heredity, dissimilarity in their most distinctive character traits, differences in their aspirations and inequality in their endowments, let alone the increasingly fierce opposition that the characters are facing from modern post-war bourgeois society.

In light of Gogol’s parent’s cultural roots and norms it is difficult foreign born Americans to assimilate into a new society. Gogol’s sudden change in “normal” can be traumatic discouraging for him to conform into what is “normal” in America. “The New World offers professional opportunity and financial betterment but also insists on assimilation and acculturation, a rejection of old habits, traditions and conditioning, and a merging with the culture of the new context […] invited to experience the death of the self as he has known it. He is asked to despise home culture which is seen by the New World as inferior, as less

Men in Golconde are motionless, floating in the sky, trapped and without a way to escape. Most people lack the willpower and motivation to achieve their dreams and take what they want from the world, or give value to the world, ignoring that the only limit to what they can do is set by themselves. The windows in Golconde are closed, meaning how nobody is watching the fallacy they are living in and how nobody will help them escape. This idea is like Plato’s Allegory of the cave, where men are prisoners in a cave, having their heads and limbs fixed so they only can see the wall in front of them. They have been in the cave since they were children and they do not know more than what they have learned from the shadows produced by fire behind them, they do not know that behind the fire is sunlight, and an entire world full of wonders waiting to be discovered. For the majority of people this cave where they are prisoners is their culture, and the way for them to be liberated is by knowledge, curiosity an urge to escape the world of relative ignorance where we feel comfort, although is difficult and even painful to escape. At the end, one of the prisoners is liberated and manages to turn around and see, but the light of the fire is too bright, he finds it difficult to overcome but he persists and eventually his eyes get adjusted to see the sunlight behind the flames, he walks out and still in pain, he observes all the detail of the new things surrounding him, the breeze, smells and his shadow, close to him is a river and he manages to see for the first time the true himself. We can be whatever we want to be, as Walt Whitman claims in his poem Song of Myself “I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise. Regardless of others, ever regardful of others” (492). In other words, we are an essence that can be molded into anything, just as the prisoner of the

The struggle of an individual in a class alienated society is emphasised by presenting two disparate classes: the bourgeois and the proletariat. The bourgeois are describes by the narrator as ‘titans and their gigantic wives’ who ‘drink barrels of champagne and bellow at each other wearing diamonds bigger than I feel’. The exaggeration used adds to the cynical tone to mock the elements of the bourgeois, but also suggests the hollowness of their wealth and how they possess greater than the narrator can grasp. The narrator in comparsion feels like a ‘cockroach’ shown in the description; they ‘just want to see you run around their money…they know they can’t threaten you with the tip, to them

On one hand, Gogol discusses the seemingly meaningless life and death of a government employee in 19th century Russia as he purchases and loses an overcoat, while on the other Kafka’s protagonist deals with surrealism as he attempts to adapt to his mysteriously transformed body. However, both authors use their protagonists’ personalities and their relationships with the people around them to portray how their economic situations shape their lives. More specifically, both Gogol and Kafka argue that money provides the characters with confidence, power, and masculinity. By examining Akaky’s transformation as he purchases his new overcoat, how Gregor makes decisions as a human, and how both characters treat fictional women, one can see that examining these two stories together allows one to see how the above characteristic traits pervade all aspects of life.

While the dead souls in the title literally refers to the “dead souls” Chichikov is accumulating, metaphorically it represents the landowners and the nobility. All the landowners Chichikov encounters are heavily flawed, and Chichikov himself is a despicable character. Controlled by their greed and materialistic tendencies, the upper class gentry of Russia ends up living artificial, dishonest lives. Consequently, they act as if they all lack a soul, a genuine human heart, choosing instead to live a life guided by avarice. The byproducts of their actions is evident; for example, Korobochka appears to be stuck in time, while all of Plyushkin’s possessions are rotting away. Furthermore, Nozdryov is always riddled with debt from his compulsive

Allusions to Nikolai V. Gogol and his short story "The Overcoat" permeate Jhumpa Lahiri's novel The Namesake, beginning with Gogol's being the name the protagonist is called through most of the book. Yet few of the reviewers of the novel mentioned Nikolai Gogol at all in their discussions of the novel, except to describe the protagonist Gogol's loathing of his name, or to quote without comment or explanation Dostoevski's famous line, "We all came out of Gogol's Overcoat." So far, no one has looked beyond the surfaces to examine the significance of the allusions to Gogol that are so much a part of the fabric of Lahiri's novel.

Readers have a very specific story told through a generic setting – with this setting presented as being necessary due to the nature of the agency for which this official worked without recognition. Gogol’s humor here is much less obvious than in “The Nose.” The official is shown to have much too great a pride in his poor, worn-out overcoat, and in is his efforts to get it repaired and the

The subject of class and wealth has remained a constant area of discussion, analysis and criticism for most of human history. The conflicts between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ have played themselves out in numerous plays, novels, movies and many other aspects of literature. The determinates of status have been investigated time and time again but the topic has not becoming boring. There are many different ways to present status in literature, as we see in Candide and Coriolanus, and there are even more ways to dissect the complexities of status and wealth. The prevalence of status and wealth in literature shows that these are topics with many differing connotations, perspectives, and ideas. In Candide and Coriolanus, status is a key part