Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat” is structured around repetition. Names, ranks, bureaucratic procedures, acts of copying, and scenes of dispossession recur throughout the story. The most visible repetition, however, appears in two encounters involving Akaky Akakievich’s new overcoat. In the first, the coat is stolen from Akaky by two mustachioed men. In the second, Akaky’s ghost—or an apparition understood to be Akaky—returns and takes the overcoat of the senior bureaucrat whom Gogol identifies only as the “Important Person.”

The relationship between these scenes can be examined through Jacques Lacan’s reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.” For Lacan, the circulation of Poe’s letter determines the positions occupied by the story’s characters. Its content remains unknown, yet its movement organizes the narrative. Gogol’s overcoat performs a comparable function. It passes between subjects, reorganizes their relationships, and produces a repeated structure of possession and loss.

There is, however, an important difference. In Poe’s story, possession of the letter provides its holder with a form of power. In Gogol’s story, the movement of the overcoat primarily reveals the powerlessness of the person who loses it. The overcoat therefore acts not simply as an object of possession but as a signifier whose circulation exposes the social and psychological vulnerability of those around it.

Two Scenes of Theft

The first theft takes place after Akaky leaves a party held by one of his colleagues. The gathering has effectively been organized in celebration of his new overcoat, which has unexpectedly made him the center of attention in the office. Walking alone through the deserted streets of St. Petersburg, Akaky is confronted by two men with mustaches. They seize his coat and disappear.

Akaky then approaches a nearby policeman, believing that he must have witnessed the theft. The policeman claims that he saw two men stop Akaky in the square but assumed that they were his friends. Instead of intervening, he advises Akaky to report the incident to a district inspector the following day.

The second scene occurs near the end of the story. The Important Person has spent the evening at a friend’s gathering and has been drinking champagne. Rather than returning to his family, he orders his coachman to take him to the home of Karolina Ivanovna, a woman with whom he enjoys an intimate friendship. During the journey, an apparition resembling Akaky grabs him by the collar and demands his overcoat. The ghost declares that he has finally found the person responsible for his suffering and takes the coat as an act of revenge.

The second scene thus repeats and reverses the first. Akaky, previously the victim, now occupies the position of the thief. The Important Person, who earlier exercised bureaucratic authority over Akaky, becomes the frightened and powerless victim. The new overcoat moves from one body to another, but the relationship structured around it remains one of dispossession, fear, and vulnerability.

The reversal also has an immediate effect on the Important Person’s desire. Before encountering the ghost, he is travelling to Karolina Ivanovna’s home. After losing his overcoat, he abandons this plan and returns to the security of his family home. Just as the new overcoat opens Akaky to forms of social and erotic desire, its loss causes the Important Person to retreat from them.

Repetition and the Signifying Chain

Sigmund Freud develops the concept of repetition compulsion in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Freud begins from the observation that subjects sometimes repeat experiences that have produced suffering rather than pleasure. Repetition therefore cannot always be explained as a straightforward attempt to obtain gratification. It suggests that psychic life contains tendencies that operate beyond the pleasure principle.

Freud eventually connects this compulsion to his speculative concept of the death drive: the tendency of a drive to restore an earlier state, ultimately imagined as a return to the inorganic. This is more complex than an unconscious wish simply to die. Repetition may involve an effort to gain mastery over a disturbing experience, but it can also recreate the very suffering it appears to overcome. Freud’s discussion can be read in the public-domain edition of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

Lacan reworks repetition in relation to language and the symbolic order. In his “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” he argues that repetition automatism is grounded in “the insistence of the signifying chain.” Poe’s letter operates as a signifier whose displacement determines the positions of the characters. They appear to possess the letter, but they are simultaneously positioned—and in a sense possessed—by it. Lacan’s seminar is available in an English translation online.

A similar structure can be identified in “The Overcoat.” The coat does not remain a passive object whose meaning is determined entirely by its owner. Its movement changes the subjects who encounter it. When Akaky acquires it, he briefly becomes visible to his colleagues and imagines a fuller life. When it is stolen, he loses not only protection from the cold but also the newly formed identity attached to it. When the Important Person loses his own coat, his authority gives way to fear. Possession and dispossession assign each character a different place within the narrative.

Yet Gogol modifies the Lacanian structure. The unknown content of Poe’s letter matters less than its circulation. The material properties of Akaky’s coat, by contrast, remain essential. The garment provides physical warmth in the severe St. Petersburg winter. It also signifies respectability, masculine appearance, social belonging, and bureaucratic status. Its material and symbolic functions cannot be completely separated.

The coat does not necessarily empower everyone who possesses it. The thieves who take Akaky’s coat disappear from the narrative, and nothing indicates that the object improves their position. What the story emphasizes is the devastation experienced by the person who loses it. In Gogol’s narrative, the signifier’s movement is registered most forcefully through absence.

The Third Position: Policeman, Reader, Analyst

Both theft scenes contain a third position in addition to the thief and the victim. During the first theft, this position is occupied by the policeman. He is present but claims not to have recognized what he saw. During the second theft, the Important Person’s coachman is nearby, but the narrative does not establish whether he sees the encounter between his passenger and Akaky’s ghost.

The policeman’s role is nevertheless crucial. By directing Akaky toward the police inspector, he begins a bureaucratic journey that eventually leads Akaky to the Important Person. Rather than recovering the overcoat, Akaky encounters a system concerned with rank, protocol, and authority. The Important Person rebukes him for approaching a superior improperly and terrifies him with the familiar question: “Do you realize who stands before you?”

Akaky returns home in a state of shock, develops a fever, and dies shortly afterwards. The policeman therefore provides continuity between the two scenes of theft. His advice indirectly brings Akaky into contact with the person whose coat the ghost will later seize.

The exchange between Akaky and the policeman also resembles, in a limited sense, an analytic scene. Akaky presents an experience that the supposed observer claims not to have witnessed properly. The policeman listens, interprets the situation according to institutional procedure, and redirects Akaky toward another authority. Yet he does not uncover the truth of the event. His interpretation extends the chain that will eventually reproduce it.

In the second scene, the position of the third observer remains uncertain. The coachman does not become an active witness, and the supernatural encounter cannot be publicly verified. The reader consequently assumes the position left vacant by the policeman. By comparing the two scenes, the reader recognizes the repeated structure and reconstructs the relationships among its participants.

The reader thereby performs something resembling the work of an analyst: not by deciding whether the ghost is real, but by tracing how the repetition positions different subjects. The first scene presents Akaky as victim and the Important Person as the distant representative of authority. The second places Akaky in the position of avenger and reduces the Important Person to a frightened, coatless body.

A Life Already Governed by Repetition

The two thefts belong to a much wider system of repetition. Even before the overcoat appears, Akaky’s identity has been formed through inherited signs and bureaucratic routines. His father, grandfather, brother-in-law, and the other members of the Bashmachkin family are associated with boots; the family name itself derives from the Russian word for shoe.

Akaky is also given his father’s name. After his mother rejects several possible names taken from the calendar, she decides that the child will be called Akaky Akakievich—Akaky, son of Akaky. The narration jokes that during his baptism the child cries as though he already knows that he is destined to become a titular councillor.

The name is therefore not simply selected for him. It places him within a repeated paternal and bureaucratic structure. Akaky appears to inherit both his identity and his social position before he can exercise any choice over them. His life repeats that of the father, while his work repeats the language produced by other officials.

As a copyist, Akaky performs the same actions every day. He reproduces official documents without altering their content, and the narrator observes that he “served with love.” When offered a slightly more demanding task, involving minor changes to an existing document, he becomes distressed and asks to return to copying.

His libidinal investment seems concentrated in this repetitive activity. He smiles at particular letters and continues copying documents at home even when he has no work left to complete. The written world becomes so absorbing that he barely notices the material environment around him. Only when a horse suddenly brings its muzzle close to his face does he realize that he is not in the middle of a sentence but standing in the street. These details appear in the English text of “The Overcoat” hosted by the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Akaky thus lives between bureaucratic writing and the physical world of St. Petersburg. More precisely, his perception of the material world is repeatedly organized by written signs. Names, ranks, documents, and copied letters determine his social existence. The overcoat becomes powerful because it briefly redirects this investment away from copying and toward his own image.

The Overcoat and Imaginary Wholeness

Before acquiring the new coat, Akaky’s desires are almost entirely confined to his work. He does not participate in the social life of his colleagues, pays little attention to his appearance, and seems largely detached from erotic experience. Saving for the coat gradually changes him. The narrator describes his life as becoming fuller, “as if he were married.” The coat is imagined as a companion that will accompany him through life.

This comparison is important because the overcoat assumes the position of an intimate partner. Akaky’s sacrifices acquire a purpose, and his previously repetitive existence becomes oriented toward a future event. His attachment to copying is partially displaced onto the anticipated garment.

Once he wears the overcoat, he receives recognition from his colleagues. They congratulate him, surround him, and insist that the garment should be celebrated. For the first time, Akaky attends an evening gathering with them. On the way, he notices an image of a woman exposing her leg and pauses before it with an unfamiliar smile. The coat does not simply keep him warm; it opens a temporary route toward social and erotic desire.

Akaky’s response to the overcoat can be compared to the logic of Lacan’s mirror stage. The story does not contain a literal mirror scene, and Akaky should not simply be treated as an infant returning to an earlier developmental stage. Nevertheless, the external image provided by the new coat gives him a temporary sense of coherence. Through the garment, he sees—or imagines—himself as a more complete, confident, and socially recognizable person.

The word new is therefore crucial. The coat represents the possibility of becoming someone different from the repetitive bureaucratic identity assigned by his name, rank, and occupation. Yet this wholeness remains dependent on an external object. Because it is attached to something that can be stolen, it is structurally fragile.

The mustachioed thieves abruptly destroy this sense of unity. Their mustaches can be read as conventional signs of aggressive masculine authority. By stripping Akaky of the image that had made him feel socially complete, they return him to a condition of dependence and invisibility. The loss of the garment consequently becomes inseparable from the collapse of the self that had been constructed around it.

The Return of the Overcoat

Akaky’s death does not end the narrative structure. Instead, the story moves from bureaucratic realism into fantasy. A ghost begins appearing in St. Petersburg and taking overcoats from people regardless of their rank. The passive copyist, who could barely defend himself against his colleagues, returns as a figure capable of frightening the city and violating its hierarchies.

The final theft both repeats and transforms the original scene. Akaky’s apparition takes the Important Person’s coat, but the act is not simply a recovery of the original object. The ghost does not reclaim his own coat from the thieves who stole it. Instead, he takes another overcoat from the authority whose cruelty contributed to his death.

This displacement is significant. The overcoat does not return to its original owner in a literal sense. What returns is the structure of loss. The Important Person must experience the vulnerability that Akaky previously endured. Having been protected by rank and institutional authority, he is reduced to the same exposed position as the subordinate whom he humiliated.

The encounter also changes him. He becomes less inclined to terrorize lower-ranking officials and begins to hesitate before asserting his authority. After his overcoat is taken, Akaky’s apparition reportedly ceases to haunt the city. The repeated scene therefore produces a partial transformation, even if it cannot undo Akaky’s suffering.

Gogol’s overcoat, like Poe’s letter, organizes the positions of the subjects through which it passes. But its most important effect is not the power it gives to its possessor. It is the vulnerability revealed by its loss. The coat offers Akaky warmth, recognition, companionship, and an imagined sense of completeness. Once removed, it exposes how dependent that identity has become upon a material sign.

Repetition operates throughout the story long before the ghost appears: in Akaky’s inherited name, his predetermined rank, his copying of letters, the routines of the department, and the hierarchy of the bureaucracy. The supernatural conclusion makes this underlying structure visible. Akaky returns because the social order that erased him has itself been built upon repetition.

The overcoat is therefore more than the object around which the plot revolves. It is a signifier whose movement reveals the instability of identity, authority, and desire. Characters believe they possess it, yet their positions are repeatedly determined by its presence or absence. In Gogol’s story, the subject wears the coat—but the coat also gives the subject a place within the symbolic order.

Works Cited

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by C. J. M. Hubback, International Psycho-Analytical Press, 1922.

Gogol, Nikolai. “The Overcoat.” Translated from the Russian. University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Lacan, Jacques. “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter.’” Écrits.