The Overcoat #3

Naming the baby + skaz narration

First, I want to thank all of you for your astonishing, gratifying, mind-stretching responses to last Sunday’s post.  In a certain way, we could just stop here - you’ve thought deeply about your reaction to the story, and logged various praises and objections and questions and things you noticed, and my guess is, you’re probably well on your way to understanding all of the above better, just by having articulated them.

But let’s carry on. (Because Gogol is worth it.)

What I’ll try to do over the next four or five Sundays is explore some of the major points you’ve raised - I just want to throw a few things out there, for you to react to, in order to, hopefully, deepen your experience of the story.

To start, I want to talk a little about the voice of the story, which, in this case, also means talking about translation.  (In some of what follows, for simplicity, I’m going to be repurposing bits from the discussion of Gogol in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. So, if something sounds familiar, you’re not hallucinating it.)