SOURCE: Fanger, Donald. “Beginnings: Fiction.” In The Creation of Nikolai Gogol, pp. 85–124. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979.

In the following excerpt, Fanger asserts that “The Nose” is a meta-narrative that explores the creative act of fiction writing.

[Gogol's “The Nose” begins]: “On March 25 an unusually strange occurrence took place in Petersburg.” The occurrence in question is the unaccountable disappearance of the nose of another ambitious civil servant, its metamorphic adventures while independent, and his frantic pursuit of it until it reappears mysteriously in place—a happy ending for a character who doesn't deserve one. The narration is by Gogol's elusive skaz narrator—ostensibly omniscient, but full of gaps, irrelevancies and non-sequiturs—ready to acknowledge oddity but only with a disconcerting fitfulness. The first draft of the story had ended by explaining that “everything described here was a dream” of Major Kovalyov, the bereaved bureaucrat (III, 399), thereby rationalizing bewilderment and...