The Overcoat Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 61 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Overcoat.

The Overcoat Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 61 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Overcoat.
This section contains 1,886 words
(approx. 5 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy The Overcoat Study Guide

In the following excerpt Proffer examines the Symbolist, Formalist and Freudian interpretations of Gogol's short story. He also discusses Gogol's style, deeming him a "verbal gymnast."

[Gogol] is rightly regarded as Russia's foremost verbal gymnast. Tongue-twisting names, rhymes, and puns spring up like clowns. Using metaphor and metonymy to turn people into toe-nails or noses, he works more transformations than a drunken Roman mythologist. His prose is poetic and onomatopoetic— rhetorical figures abound, rhythmic and phonetic considerations help determine each phrase. Pushkin's favorite punctuation is the period. Gogol's is the semicolon; and at first glance, the profusion of dependent clauses and qualifications may bring to mind a fishing reel's backlash. Many of Gogol's old-fashioned contemporaries considered him a vulgarian, both because of his inelegant subject matter and the "non-literary" vocabulary which he introduced (colloquialisms, bureaucratese, dialectisms, jargon, and neologisms); but with time his lexical salmagundi, syntactical...

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This section contains 1,886 words
(approx. 5 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy The Overcoat Study Guide
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