Theme Of Irony In The Overcoat

It is not so easy to give a complete definition of irony even though its ability to make people laugh or smile and therefore to make them think, as part of the fundamental human experiences.

One of the main themes that traverse Gogol’s repertoire is exactly the theme of irony.

Analysing it in-depth, his irony may reveal fruitful to enter the 'bottomless pocket ' of The Overcoat as well as lots of his other works.

The ironic tissue that he weaves is the keystone that most matters to try to understand what really hides beyond and behind apparently logic and harmless details.

In fact, Gogol enjoys his writing by making use of various devices that lead the whole shebang into a difficult matter.

A literary Russian figure of his age, Sergey

Let us take a look at some examples. Consider the character of Akaky Akakievich himself. He is a bureaucrat in a department of the Russian government in St. Petersburg. He is treated with no more respect than "a common fly", regarded as a nobody and frequently mocked because deprived of every sign of power. The absence of participation and compassion facing the character’s death functions as a crossroads of irony, reinforced by the generalization (“A being disappeared, who was protected by none, dear to none…”).

In his famous essay on laugher, Bergson points out that emotional detachment is the fundamental prerequisite of laughter, that "the absence of feelings usually accompanies laughter" because it is difficult to laugh at something one is aware of. It helps, in this way, to look at the world from the outside, to zoom out.

Akaky Akakievich’s name is the first irony-marker itself; it stresses a repetition; a given name just like his father’s. Then, "kak" means “like”, a word which is linked to the 'sameness ', evoking his single-mindedness of copying, that condemns him to

His name invites nothing but derision, also because, to Russians, it recalls a similar word that means "to defecate".

The theme of the marriage is clearly in evidence, but treated in an ironic way. “In The Overcoat the ‘marriage’ of Akaky Akakievich is to a coat…”, writes Peace. Akaky Akakievich perceives now his existence “fuller, as if he were married.”.

Another irony-marker could be also contained in the approach with respect to the theme of life after death. The dead who returns represents the turn of the victim into the perpetrator.

The contrast between the beginning of the “poor story” of Akaky Akakievich and the “fantastic” ending is well presented at the end of the text, especially when one reads the subtle wordplay on ‘dead’ and ‘alive’.

In fact, Akaky Akakievich’s absurd only really comes with his death, with the police going to “catch the corpse, alive or dead.” (“Who could have imagined that this was not the end of Akaky Akakievich—that he was destined to raise a commotion after death, as if in compensation for his utterly insignificant life?”)

I 's important to bear in mind that Gogol doesn 't hide nor soften anything. He just suspends the action or omits some parts, joking with the reader with his 'gaps in memory ',