George Saunders

The narration in “The Nose,” it turns out, is a particular Russian form of unreliable first-person narration called skaz. Imagine an actor telling a story in character. And that character is…not right. He is, per the literary critic Viktor Vinogradov, “sharply characterized by his substandard speech.” According to another critic, Robert Maguire, the Gogolian skaz narrator “has little formal education and little idea of how to develop an argument, let alone talk in an eloquent and persuasive way about his feelings, although he wishes to be considered informed and observant; he tends to ramble and digress and cannot distinguish the trivial from the important.” The writer and translator Val Vinokur adds (and this we’ve already begun to notice) that the resulting story is distorted by “improper narrative emphasis” and “misplaced assumption.” As Maguire puts it, the narrator’s “enthusiasms outrun common sense.”

So, this isn’t graceless writing; this is a great writer writing a graceless writer writing. (And not only that: it’s a great writer writing a graceless writer writing about a world in which a severed nose winds up in a loaf of bread.)

Every story is narrated by someone, and since everyone has a viewpoint, every story is misnarrated (is narrated subjectively).

Since all narration is misnarration, Gogol says, let us misnarrate joyfully.

The fun here is spending a few moments in the land where language goes to admit what it really is: a system of communication with limitations, suitable for use in everyday life but wonky in its higher registers. Language can appear to say more than it has a right to say; we can form it into sentences that are not in relationship with what actually is or even what could be.

Language, like algebra, operates usefully only within certain limits. It’s a tool for making representations of the world, which, unfortunately, we then go on to mistake for the world itself. Gogol is not making a ridiculous world; he’s showing us that we ourselves make a ridiculous world in every instant, by our thinking.

So, it’s a poem: a machine for conveying bonus meaning.

There’s something thwarting in the very mechanics of Gogol-world, an essential miscommunication at work, one that saturates everything, even the structure of the story, even its internal logic.

That is, as we’ve said, the meaning of a story in which something impossible happens is not that the thing happened (it’s only language, after all, with somebody at the other end of it, making it up) but in the way the story reacts to the impossibility. That is how the story tells us what it believes.

“The Nose” suggests that rationality is frayed in every moment, even in the most normal of moments. But distracted by the temporary blessings of stability and bounty and sanity and health, we don’t notice.

Gogol is sometimes referred to as an absurdist, his work meant to communicate that we live in a world without meaning. But to me, Gogol is a supreme realist, looking past the way things seem to how they really are.

Gogol says that we are, in our everyday perceptions, deceived.