SOURCE: Rowe, William Woodin. “Tales.” In Through Gogol's Looking Glass: Reverse Vision, False Focus, and Precarious Logic, pp. 100–06. New York: New York University Press, 1976.

In the following excerpt, Rowe asserts that “The Nose” represents a reversal of the realms of waking and sleeping, reality and dream.

Viktor Vinogradov has extensively related this strange story to what he terms the “nosology” that pervaded the literary and non-literary atmosphere of the 1820s and 1830s.¹ He has also related “The Nose” to mentions of noses in many of Gogol's other writings, including a letter in which Gogol confused “a furious desire” to be transformed into a single huge nose, the better to imbibe the fragrances of spring.²

In terms of the present study, “The Nose” may be viewed as a reversal of waking and sleeping worlds: both the drunken barber and his apparent victim awake into a nightmarelike reality.³ (Vinogradov refers...