Deeds to heaven

The narrator in Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls is omniscient and intrusive. Vignette-like chapters guide us through the parochialism and petty calculations that drive the nineteenth-century rural gentry. The landowners are as eager to sell their dead souls as our caricatured hero, Chichikov, is to buy them. Despite his slovenly underhandedness, Chichikov gets off the hook. We have no reason to trust his redemption. The novel stops abruptly, the curtain never quite falling. The distinction between a dead soul and an immortal soul remains elusive. Gogol knows.