People go through their lives and confront hundreds, if not thousands of people, on a regular basis. But usually they are so caught up in the particularities of their own lives that they ignore the existence of the vibrant lives of other people. As seen in Koenig 's definition of "sonder" in the epigraph, each person goes around, living their individual lives that are blurred together into the vague multitude of a crowd. The novel in verse "Dead Souls" written by Gogol addresses the idea of sonder in the context of the multitude of peasants in Russia. Both the narrator and the protagonist, Chichikov, ignore the individualities of people of lower social standing, the architype of which is the Russian peasant. Gogol tacitly contributes to the idea of people easily blurred into anonymity in a crowd by introducing countless peasants whose stories are not returned to or …show more content…
Chichikov 's overwhelming sense of the sheer number of these people is extended to the reader. Only through Chichikov experiencing sonder can individuals and their idiosyncrasies be acknowledged. The peasantry is originally introduced in the novel as a part of society that does not need description, due to the homogeneousness of the population and the distastefulness of discussion about lower classes. The first example that demonstrates the purposeful lack of description of this section of society occurs when Chichikov is first sizing up the unnamed town that he decides to temporarily set up his residence. In describing the dwellings of the peasantry, he states: "In some places these houses looked lost amidst a street wide as a field, and the endless wooden fences; in others, they had been knocked together into a cluster, and here a greater movement of people and greater animation were noticeable." (9). The emphasis