The Overcoat Themes

Nikolai Gogol’s Russia was a country run by an extremely unwieldy bureaucracy. Under the control of Tsar Nicholas I, the government was large, slow, and corrupt. Much of this was due to the fact that many of the civil servants in the Russian system were uneducated and very poor. In “The Overcoat,” Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin is one such civil servant. Though he can read and write and is not at the lowest rung of the…

One of the tragedies Gogol highlights in “The Overcoat” is the insignificance of Akaky Akakievich’s life. The clerk’s unimportance is felt early on in the story. Gogol’s phrase “In a certain department…there worked a certain civil servant” implies that his story could happen to any civil servant in any department, and therefore that Akaky Akakievich’s life is more or less interchangeable. His interchangeability is reinforced by his occupation as a copyist, a job that…

Early on in “The Overcoat,” Gogol gives his readers the strong sense that Akaky Akakievich’s life is destined for mediocrity. His family name, Bashmachkin, derived from the Russian word bashmak, meaning “shoe,” already indicates his low social standing. In addition, the narrator notes that his “far-fetched” given name, Akaky Akakievich, was actually fated, as he was named after his father. When they christen baby Akaky, Gogol writes, the baby “wept and made a…