The Nose
A Petersburg barber cuts into his breakfast loaf, finds a nose in it, and recognizes it as belonging to a collegiate assessor he shaves twice a week; the assessor wakes the same morning to a flat place in the middle of his face. The nose is already out in the capital in a gold-braided uniform, three ranks above its owner, and declines to be addressed familiarly. Absurdism a century before the word, and Petersburg's other great joke about an official who is nothing without his trappings.
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Lineage
- companion to ↑ Nevsky Prospect
- companion to ↑ Diary of a Madman
- ↓ The Overcoat
- ↓ The Double
Attributes
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Plot structure
Symbol / motif
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 71% · 15 shared
- 65% · 13 shared
- 60% · 12 shared
- 60% · 11 shared
- 57% · 12 shared
- 57% · 12 shared