In the semi end part we see the ghost of akaky insisted himself on pulling off others cloak irrespective of every rank and status-what is this suppose to mean?is it connected to the very line"I am your brother". I can't catch this connection precisely.please explain it.
Akaky becomes an extremely conspicuous figure in death. Stories begin to circulate that the ghost of a clerk is haunting St. Petersburg, stealing overcoats to replace his own stolen coat. This ghost steals all kinds of coats from all kinds of people, “regardless of rank or title” (420). An absurd order is issued to the police to “catch the dead man at all costs, dead or alive” (420). He is almost captured by some policemen, until he vanishes suddenly in a way that makes them question whether they had ever in fact caught him. Policemen become “so afraid of dead men” that they become “wary of seizing living ones,” instead shouting from a distance, “Hey, you, on your way!”
In this way, though the disaster of the story is clearly one that happens to Akaky because of his poverty—his coat is stolen and he does not have the money or power to have the theft redressed nor to buy a new coat—it forms part of Gogol’s project of egalitarianism. Throughout the story, Gogol repeatedly emphasizes that difficulty can befall everyone, no matter their status: the narrator describes Akaky as someone “upon whom disaster then fell as unbearably as it falls upon the kings and rulers of this world…” (420)
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