Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Nose, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Fashion, Appearances, and Status
Absurdity, Magic, and Reality
Insecurity, Masculinity, and Identity
Summary
Analysis
In early April, some two weeks after the nose disappeared, Kovalev wakes to find his regular face with a nose in the middle.
Joyous Kovalev visits Ivan Yakovlevich. Kovalev asks the nervous Ivan Yakovlevich if his hands are clean (Ivan Yakovlevich affirms they are) before proceeding with a careful shave.
Kovalev appears to have learned nothing from his time as a social outcast. Picking on downtrodden Ivan Yakovlevich for his stinky hands, Kovalev returns back to his old bully-self the moment his nose reappears on his face.
Themes
With a fresh shave, Kovalev hits the town. He resumes his regular practice of hitting on women and treating women rudely and merrily stuffing snuff up his nostrils.
When he sees Podtochina and her daughter, Kovalev mockingly refers to the pair as “hen-folk.” The narrator describes how, moving forward, Kovalev was particularly pleased with his appearance. He even goes so far as to say that Kovalev was proud of his nose, feeling superior to men with smaller noses.
Kovalev returns to his manipulative old ways with women, reducing Podtochina and her daughter to animals. The nose again is a symbol for Kovalev’s performance of toxic masculinity. That is, with the nose, he feels authorized to harass women. Further, as Kovalev compares the size of his nose to that of other men, the nose plays the role one would expect of a penis.
Themes
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The narrator reflects on the story as a whole. As he describes it, the story is strange and nonsensical and raises many questions like, “how did the nose end up in the baked bread and how did Ivan Yakovlevich himself…?” However, the narrator is unable to answer any of his own questions and declares that the story is simply one of the many weird and inexplicable events to occur in the real world: “Such was the story that occurred in the northern capital of our vast country!”
The narrator struggles to contain all the story’s magical elements into one all-encompassing narrative. Further, in this conclusion, the narrator juxtaposes the story’s magical elements with its real-life setting, suggesting that unexplainable events are a part of everyday life.
Themes
