What's in a name?

"Bother," said the poor woman, "what queer names! I've never really heard such names! Now if it had only been Varadat or Varukh, but it would be Trifily and Varkhassy!" Another page was turned and the names in the calendar were Pavsikakhy and Vakhtissy. "Well," said the mother, "I can see that such is the poor innocent infant's fate. If that is so, let him rather be called after his father. His father was Akaky, so let the son be Akaky too." It was in this was that he came to be called Akaky..."
"...We have told how it had come about at such length because we are anxious that the reader should realize himself it that it could not have happened otherwise, and that to give him any other name was quite out of the question."

Nikolai Gogol, "The Overcoat," from The Overcoat and other tales of good and evil, pg. 253.



I've chosen this early excerpt from The Overcoat because I've been interested, for a while now, in the idea of the name and its importance to the both the character and the plot of a story. Here we have an unnamed woman trying to somehow pick the name of her newborn child from a rather sorry set of options. While we already know who our protagonist is, what this particular digression from the story (and the others that follow) does is to somehow novelize the short story genre in a way that it straddles the boundaries of both novel and short story, and contains both the extended narrative of generations, events, day-to-day, and the specialized specific narrative of a single character that is the short story. Or one could just say that's the way Russians do it.
I'm making this argument not because I want to overcomplicate a relatively simple text, but because it is Dostoevsky, a novelist over and over again (but not alien to the SS) who recalls Gogal as the one who laid the foundations for the rest of Russian literature. But to come back to the excerpt here, what do we do with this long-winded name game, when all we're really concerned with is an overcoat? There are a couple of things that come to mind: First, the history of his name is the history of the character. It's here where I'd like to think about the idea of repetition and the way the second time something comes about, it's deteriorated and a lesser, worser version of the first. Later in the century, Marx will hit upon this in a profound manner when he writes the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, a book that opens with the sentence, "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."Tragedy moves the human to tears, possibly regret and forgiveness. I'm not so sure what farce does. And certainly, Akaky, our man, is arguably till the very end of the plot, in different ways, a farcical character.
I now want to circle back to the original teaser I put out there-- is Gogol playing with the idea of a novel? Of course, The Overcoat is by no means a novel, but I would like to think that Gogol uses the various extended personal histories in the story to somehow make it speak beyond its genre. Akaky alone cannot be a protagonist, and his story must come with those of others. Perhaps the answer to my question, then, is surprisingly, no. This is not a short story flirting with the idea of the novel, but maybe the short story flirting with the idea of short and cryptic narrative... and making the reader go along with it.