The Overcoat Narrator:

First Person (Peripheral Narrator):

You might be tempted to think that this is a story told in the third person, but you have to look carefully. Even though the narrator seems objective at times, there are moments that betray him. For example: "Akaky Akakievich was born, if my memory fails me not, towards night on the 23d of March" (4). Doesn't that sound like some guy you just met is trying to tell you a story? A third person narrator doesn't have to check his memory and doesn't use words like "I" or "my."

Now that we have that settled, let's talk about skaz. Skaz is a Russian term for an unreliable narrator. The term skaz comes from the Russian word skazat, or "to tell," and it's a reference to oral storytelling.

Unless you listened to it on tape, "The Overcoat" is clearly not an oral story, but the narrator tells it as if it is. Whether we like it or not, the narrator goes into detail about completely insignificant things. He makes jokes with us, and his storytelling sometimes gets off-track, just like you'd expect if somebody were telling you about Akaky from memory. All of this gives the narrator a distinct personality and adds comedy to the story.

Perhaps the easiest way to see the impact the narrator has on the story would be to imagine what it would be like from another point of view. If "The Overcoat" were told from Akaky's point of view, it would probably be much more boring, depressing, and cause us to totally sympathize with him instead of laugh at him a little. If the story were told from the prominent personage's perspective, we might have only had a paragraph about a strange old man named Akaky in a pompous self-monologue of a story. Even if "The Overcoat" were written in an objective third person, it would have been different because it would not have the comedic asides and humorous omissions that our first person narrator inserts.

In other words, this perspective is important because it makes the story. If anyone else told it, it wouldn't be "The Overcoat."