The skaz tradition

 From chapter "The Door to the Truth Might Be Strangeness," I learn that skaz is Gogol's narrative style.  

The result is awkward, funny, and true, touched with the spirit of the (odd) person doing the telling

the skaz tradition... "challenges the notion that a disinterested, objective, third-person-omniscient narrator exists anywhere in the real world.... Every story is narrated by someone, and since everyoen has a viewpoint, every story is misnarrated (is narrated subjectively). 

Since all narration is misnarration, Gogol says, let us misnarate joyfully.  

The narration in "The Nose," it turns out, is a particular Russian form of unreliable first-person narration called skaz. Imagine an actor tellingn a story in character. And that character is... not right.  

The story is distorted by "improprer narrative emphasis" and "misplaced assumption."  

So, this isn't graceless writing; this is a great writer writing a graceless writer writing.

Our narrator is touched with a stiff but imprecise literary formality.  He's pedantic and superior and overestimates his intelligence and charm.  He has one arm over our shoulders and something strange on his breath as he (clumbisly, grandiousely, making basic errors) invites us, his fellow sophisticates, to join him in looking down at his (lowly) characters.

(yet, we see him as on the same level as the clueless characters). The purpose of this attempt at elevation is to keep himself above the Ivans and Praskoovyas of the world. But because he's no good at it, he gets placed by us, down there beside, or even below them.  

It's like a prose version of the theory of relativity: no fixed, objective, "correct" viewpoint exists; an unbalanced narrator describes, in an unbalanced voice, the doings of a cast of unbalanced characters.

In other words, like life. 

Douglas Unger, one of my professors at Syracuse years ago, offered a model for how people communicate in the world. 

When two people are talking, Doug suggested, each has a cartoon bubble overhead, fullof his or her private hopes and projections and fears and preexisting worries and so on. Person A talks, Person B listens, waiting to respond, but as what Person A is saying passess into Person's B's cartoon bubble, it gets mangled.  Say person B's bubble is full of guilt because, after she forgot to call her mother on her birthday, her brother chidingly texted her about it. When Person A says, "I have to give a speech next week," Person B, thinking of the rude things her brother just texted, replies (out of her bubble), "People can be so hardsh." Person A, his bubble full o f anxiety about this forthcoming speech, hear, "It's true, you'll probably blow it," and frowns. Person B thinks, "Oh, great, Person A is frowning at me because he sees that I'm the kidn of jerk who forgets her mother's birthday." (283)

Later, Saunders talks about how the skaz narration helps us understand one type of evil.

...on the mundane side of things, if we want to understand evil (nastiness, oppression, neglect) we should recognize that the people who commit these sings don't always cackle while committing them; often they smile, becuase they're feeling so useful and virtuous. [refers to Victor Klemperer's I will Bear Witness about antisemitism in Germany. ] 

Also, "Deborah Eisenberg pointed out the great harm tha can be done by a handful of evil people, as long as they have the 'passive asssistance of many, many other people who glance out of the windows of their secure homes and see a cloudless sky."  She goes on to list the sins of such passive people: "carelessness, poor logic, casual snobbery -- either social or intellectual -- inattentiveness." [from Gregor von Rezzori's book Memoirs of an Anti-Semite)