ears so he could buy a good shotgun only to lose it in the thick reeds when hunting with it for the first time:
The hero of Gogol's story is just such a government underling--an underpaid document copyist whose ragged coat with innumerable patches cannot withstand another Petersburg winter. After long privation and endless economizing, he has a new one made. On the very first day he wears it, it is stolen from his back. His frantic search for it results only in the callous indifference of the high official to whom he appeals for help. He catches cold and dies of pneumonia, but his ghost returns to haunt the city streets, snatching overcoats from pedestrians, until, finding the offensive official, he snatches his and disappears forever (Lindstrom 89).
Gogol gives a psychological orientation to the depiction of the "poor clerk" by bringing the narrator of the story closer to the hero, though the two remain separate:
In "The Overcoat," close proximity of narrator to hero is more or less excluded by the subject, by the idea of the work . . . and also by
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