Absurdity, Magic, and Reality Theme Analysis

In “The Nose,” readers follow Collegiate Assessor Kovalev as he wakes up one day without a nose and later stumbles upon his missing organ sauntering around town like a well-to-do gentleman. This strange tale predates magical realism but fits right in with the genre—as is typical of other works of magical realism, magic occurs in this story within a realistic setting, among real-seeming people, and without any discernable reason, making it all the more jarring and unbelievable. Through the magic, absurdity, and resulting comedy that pepper the pages of his otherwise commonplace story, Nikolai Gogol makes a statement that real life is also full of the absurd and the unexpected, and that not everything in life needs—or even has—an explanation.

Even though the story centers around the loss and rediscovery of Kovalev’s nose—and thus readers might anticipate some grand reveal at the end of the story as to why this all happened—the story provides no logic or reasoning to explain the nose’s disappearance and subsequent reappearance. For instance, when the nose randomly appears in Ivan Yakovlevich’s breakfast, readers never find out why or how it got there. As he digs around in his breakfast, Yakovlevich struggles to process the strange event in a meaningful way: “Ivan Yakovlevich poked [the bread] cautiously with his knife and felt with his finger. ‘Firm!’ he said to himself. ‘What could it be?’ He stuck in his fingers and pulled out—a nose!” The scene is one of pure bewilderment and resists any kind of explanation. Meanwhile, Kovalev’s discovery of his lack of a nose is just as jarring. When he first wakes up, he follows his idiosyncratic morning routine of making a “brr…” noise “with his lips—something he always did on waking up, though he himself was unable to explain the reason for it.” Right away, this sets up the idea that some events are so peculiar that there is no explanation for them. Eventually, Kovalev peers into the mirror and discovers his missing nose: “He began feeling with his hand to find out if he might be asleep, but it seemed he was not. The collegiate assessor Kovalev jumped out of bed, shook himself: no nose!” Kovalev’s bewildered reaction reveals that this event also has no rhyme or reason underpinning it: he simply no longer has a nose. Likewise, near the end of the story when the police officer returns the nose to Kovalev, the officer fails to explain how he was able to apprehend the nose. Instead, he describes the capture as only “a strange chance,” reinforcing the idea that this event—like other bizarre happenings outside of the pages of the story—resists explanation and reason.

In the face of these odd events, Yakovlevich and Kovalev both struggle to make sense of how such a bizarre occurrence could have possibly taken place in “real” life. Upon finding the nose nestled in a loaf of bread, Yakovlevich “thought and thought and did not know what to think.” His wife, Praskovya Osipova, immediately tries to fill in the gaps of this strange event with one almost-reasonable explanation: her alcoholic husband pulled or cut off the nose when giving Kovalev a trim the previous day. The two devolve into what appears to be a usual argument, with Osipova dragging her husband for his drunkenness. The irony here is that although the inciting incident is extraordinary, the ensuing argument is typical, pointing again to the story’s overarching claim that strange, inexplicable things often play out against the backdrop of everyday life. Meanwhile, for most of the story, noseless and confused, Kovalev continuously questions his reality: “I must be dreaming, or just imagining it; maybe, by mistake somehow, instead of water I drank the vodka.” In a moment of slapstick comedy, “the major pinched himself so painfully that he cried out” in an attempt to make sense of events. The sudden disappearance of Kovalev’s nose is so wildly absurd that he is left grasping for possible explanations, and the only two he can come up with are that he is dreaming or drunk, neither of which are actually the case. As Kovalev is a realistic, run-of-the-mill character—emotional, proud, flawed, self-conscious—the story emphasizes how the weird and the inexplicable can happen to anyone at any time, even outside the confines of the story.

Adding to the story’s footing in reality, all these fictional events occur within the real city of St. Petersburg, Russia, allowing the story’s absurd elements to build off the absurdism of everyday life. At the beginning of the story, the narrator opens with this description of the setting and events: “an extraordinarily strange incident occurred in St. Petersburg.” With a real-life town as the story’s backdrop, the story highlights that the strange and the inexplicable abound anywhere and everywhere. Along these lines, the plot unspools among very ordinary places within the otherwise-ordinary city: a barber shop, cafes, city streets, apartments, and a newspaper office. At the story’s conclusion, the narrator still fails to find a reasonable answer for how or why the story’s events unfolded the way they did. In utter bewilderment, the narrator exclaims, “Such was the story that occurred in the northern capital of our vast country!” In using the possessive “our” in “our vast country,” and noting that these bizarre events happened in a well-known place—“the northern capital”—the narrator plays into the idea that the real-world of the reader is brimming with the absurd, and that many things in life resist an explanation. Likewise, the narrator closes the story declaring, “Say what you like, but such incidents do happen in the world—rarely, but they do happen.” With this, the narrator—and, by extension, Gogol—is suggesting that the real world, outside of the pages of “The Nose” is also infused with absurdity.