Obsession with Objects in Gogol’s

Suppressed emotions have a tendency to channel themselves into alternative outlets, often materializing into a completely different and unrelated manifestation. Obsessive attachments to objects can often be attributed to extreme emotions resulting from unresolved issues. In Gogol’s “The Overcoat” and Flaubert’s “A Simple Soul” the protagonists are obsessed with objects, an overcoat and a parrot respectively, which corresponds to an unusual materialization of their greatest desires in life.

Gogol creates a truly sympathetic character in Akakii by revealing the rather demeaning details of his appearance and actions through the narrator’s influential descriptions and intrusive commentary. The narrator calls Akakii unremarkable and then goes on to describe his shabby attire including his “dressing jacket”: “The patches…clumsy and ugly”. The reader recognizes that the appearance of the jacket is insignificant to Akakki; he is only desperate to keep warm and merely wants Petrovich to fix the jacket regardless of its final appearance. The reader empathizes with his practicality. The narrator then mentions the pitiful strategy in which Akakki implements in order to economize for the purchase of his new coat: he undergoes such impractical life adjustments which include washing his underwear less frequently and treading softly over cobbles and flagstones so as to prolong the soles of his shoes. One cannot help but feel sorry for Akakii Akakievich. His desperation and strife for a mere coat evokes a sense of pity in the readers. The reader is forced to sympathize with this “simple-hearted” man who’s only goal in life is the rather modest aspiration to get an overcoat. Before his pursuit of a new overcoat, nothing existed for him outside of his copying and he had never noticed what was going on around him in the streets, but somehow his occupation with obtaining the new overcoat and his actual attainment of it filled his life, as “though he had married”. After receiving the overcoat he was praised by his colleagues that once ridiculed him and