The Carriage

In addition to mocking the shortcomings of the gentry, Gogol satirizes (or comically exposes) a number of customs, beliefs, and institutions throughout the story, including those associated with rural, unsophisticated village life. Describing a “fashionable board fence [standing] all by itself” in the town of B—, for example, the narrator claims:

[The fence had been] erected as a model for other structures by the mayor in the time of his youth, when he had not yet acquired the habit of sleeping immediately after the midday meal and drinking a decoction flavored with dried gooseberries before going to bed (182).

This is the same tendency toward drunken forgetfulness that the description of the general’s boozy dinner party will later critique. The story holds all authority figures—even small-town mayors—up for the same type of satirical appraisal.

Chertokutsky’s exaggeration of the quality of his carriage is the major catalyst for the story’s disastrous ending. He tells the general that “there is no better carriage than a Viennese one” and that he has “never seen such a roomy carriage before” (187). Even more ridiculously, bragging about its size, he says that “you could fit a whole bull into the side pockets” (187). The latter in particular is an example of hyperbole: extreme or even absurd exaggeration. While Chertokutsky obviously does not mean it in a literal sense, his habit of overstatement builds up expectation among the general and the officers and is ultimately responsible for their shock and disappointment when they see the actual carriage. The narrative itself often engages in the same kind of hyperbole, emphasizing the unusual, unexpected, or unrealistic size, quality, or intensity of the setting. For example, as Chertokutsky’s wife sits outside admiring the beauty of the landscape, the narrator says that “the sun burned with all the power of its rays” and “the flowers warmed by the sun tripled their scent” (191). It is not enough that the weather is pleasant: Rather, it must be the most pleasant day imaginable. By associating Chertokutsky and the narrator through their shared tendency toward hyperbole, the story collapses the boundaries between the two and highlights the narrator’s inherent unreliability.