George Saunders

“The Nose” suggests that rationality is frayed in every moment, even in the most normal of moments. But distracted by the temporary blessings of stability and bounty and sanity and health, we don’t notice.

Gogol is sometimes referred to as an absurdist, his work meant to communicate that we live in a world without meaning. But to me, Gogol is a supreme realist, looking past the way things seem to how they really are.

Gogol says that we are, in our everyday perceptions, deceived.

There is something eternal about Gogol. He is true in all times and places. When the end of the world comes, he seems to say, it will (it can only) come out of this moment, out of the way we are thinking in this (and every) moment. The misunderstanding operative in the larger world is operative within us, right now, even if we’re sitting alone in a quiet room.

That is what makes Gogol great—that he somehow felt inclined to do that, and then did it, with such strange, happy confidence. The inexplicable uptick in fondness for the world I feel, moving through that section, which is not essential to the action of the story but seems to have been done just for the fun of it, is, for me, what Gogol is all about.

but the beauty of the story is that, through all of this, or in spite of all of this, or all of this notwithstanding, the nose is still…a nose. A nose of sorts. A real nose and a metaphorical one. A nose that keeps changing in response to what the story needs of it. The nose is a tool to get us looking at the ways in which we go in search of that which is essential and which we have lost. The nose is the means by which Gogol does his crazy dance of joy. But also, it’s a nose. It even has a pimple.

I make a protest about the story’s failure to cohere logically.

“I know, right?” the narrator says. “It’s a train wreck, isn’t it?”

Somehow that’s enough.

And just like that—like one of those Tibetan monks who spend weeks fastidiously creating a sand mandala—Gogol happily destroys his magnificent creation and sweeps it into the river.

In other words, voice is not just an embellishment; it’s an essential part of the truth. In “The Nose,” we feel the narrator to be from that world of functionaries and petty officials and we hear that in his voice, and the story benefits from this; told in this way, the story has an extra dimension of truth, and of joy.

What’s lost?

Well, as we’ve said (and in order this time): the rainstorm, Alyohin, Pelageya, the swimming, Burkin’s reaction to the swimming.

In this digression-free version, Ivan lays out his case against happiness and there’s nothing in counterweight.

But regardless of how the story came to be, part of the pleasure of reading it lies in this: what we first felt as waste or indirectness (the digression) turns out to be exactly what elevates the story “out of the plane of its original conception” and makes it so complex and mysterious. What at first seemed like a digression is understood to be beautifully efficient.

“Gooseberries,” as we’re seeing, proceeds by a method of persistent self-contradiction. If one aspect of it seems to be expressing a certain view, a new aspect of it will appear and challenge that view.

The story is not there to tell us what to think about happiness. It is there to help us think about it. It is, we might say, a structure to help us think.