The Overcoat

The overcoat is the central symbol of the story. It represents both the banal and the fantastic. It is a useful, necessary piece of clothing, meant to protect against the harshness of the elements. It is also a thing of beauty when well made. Having the protagonist obsess over something as mundane as a coat highlights the story’s Critique of Bureaucracy. Akaky Akakievich cannot imagine anything more wonderful than a new coat, and his mind is soon absorbed by its details in part because they stand in such contrast to the drab routine of the Department. The narrator says, “Why not really have marten on the collar? Meditation on this subject always made him absent-minded” (317). Acquiring the coat is the “most triumphant and festive day in his life” (319), a seemingly ridiculous response to something as functional as an overcoat.

However, because a coat is such a necessary garment in a St. Petersburg winter, it is impossible to fault Akaky Akakievich entirely. He needs the new coat, as going without it into the cold eventually costs him his life. The overcoat thus also represents the compassion that Akaky Akakievich never receives or quickly loses. He dies not so much from the cold weather as from the coldness of his colleagues and the

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