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All he wanted to advertise was a runaway black poodle. And what do you think he was up to really? In the end we had a libel case on our hands: the poodle was meant as a satire on a government cashier.

In this passage, Gogol slyly inserts his ironic sense of humor into the story to provide a subtle metafictional comment. The newspaper clerk is hesitant to publish an ad about Kovalyov’s missing nose because they recently published an ad about a missing poodle that ended up being a satirical joke mocking a government official. Kovalyov insists that his ad isn’t about anything other than his nose. Of course, this is humorous because Gogol’s “The Nose” is in fact a satirical story that uses a nose as a metaphor to examine the performative and illusory aspects of social status, specifically questioning the validity of Russia’s Table of Ranks. Thus, just like the poodle ad, “The Nose” is a satire that mocks government officials, which drapes Kovalyov’s insistence that his ad is not satirical in irony.

If I’d lost an arm or a leg it wouldn’t be so bad. Even without any ears things wouldn’t be very pleasant, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world. A man without a nose, though, is God knows what, neither fish nor fowl.

This passage points to how important prominent physical features can be to our understanding of our own identity and humanity. While much of “The Nose” satirizes society’s obsession with how we and others present ourselves, and the effect that these performative presentations have on our reputations, it is also unequivocal that external appearance does have a legitimate influence on the trajectory of our lives. It affects our careers, our love lives, our self-worth, and even our humanity. Kovalyov’s missing nose is so apparent, and changes his face so greatly, that he begins to doubt his selfhood and his humanness.

Whenever Kovalyov the Collegiate Assessor said ‘Your hands always stink!’ while he was being shaved, Ivan Yakovlevich would say: ‘But why should they stink?’ The Collegiate Assessor used to reply: ‘Don’t ask me, my dear chap. All I know is, they stink.’

Whenever Ivan shaves Kovalyov, the latter comments on the bad smell of the former’s hands. There is no identifiable reason for Ivan’s hands to smell so terribly to Kovalyov, which suggests that the smell might not be literal. Rather, Kovalyov believes that Ivan’s hands stink because he perceives that Ivan is of a low rank, and is therefore inherently dirtier than and ultimately inferior to Kovalyov. The smell is another illusion brought about by Kovalyov’s strong belief that status is the foundation of one’s identity and that it controls and shapes all aspects of one’s interior and exterior self.

I simply don’t know what one can make of it . . . However, when all is said and done, one can concede this point or the other and perhaps you can even find . . . well then you won’t find much that isn’t on the absurd side, will you?

At the end of “The Nose,” the narrator initially seems to share in the reader’s confusion and frustration with the unrealistic events of the story. However, as the narrator reflects further, they make an interesting statement: “You won’t find much that isn’t on the absurd side.” This sentence works on two levels. On one level, it appears to refer to the story at hand, saying that everything in the tale is absurd. On another, more subtle level, it remarks on the world beyond the story, insinuating that everything—not just the tale of Kovalyov’s nose—is tinged with absurdity. Gogol invites the reader to consider the possibility that practically everything in their lives, from their interactions with others to their ingrained societal customs, can be seen as absurd, unreasonable, or strange when investigated with a more critical lens.

Next section Major Kovalyov

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