Poor Akakiy

This guy seriously must be the most humble person I have ever read about. At the beginning of the narrative he is simply content to be and do his work, even with the other officers laughing at him all the time. Then he changes so much when he finally gets his cloak. Akakiy goes from a quiet mouse of a man to someone who begins to actually see things. For example, when he is wearing his new cloak and walking to the party, he walks through a very rich district of St. Petersburg and looks in all of the shop windows at the beautiful goods there and marvels at them. Before the coat, Akakiy would never have even visited that district and would have continued to shuffle his way to work, only looking forward to his copying. However, it seems to me like Gogol is trying to imply that people can't rise from their class to a higher class. As soon as Akakiy gets his new cloak he loses it again, therefore losing the only thing that makes him look at least like someone from the "middle class" instead of the poor man he really is and then pretty soon after that he dies without ever having found his cloak. It just is a somber ending for a man who had seemed to finally gain some kind of life in him.

I commented on Briana's post.