The rascal as hero

The rascal as hero is the novel’s deliberate choice to place an acquisitive, morally compromised man at its center. Rather than present virtue as the unquestioned qualification for a protagonist, the narrator asks readers to examine how an ordinary passion for gain can govern a person—and whether even a cold or compromised nature may contain the possibility of change. The device makes the hero’s moral limitations part of the book’s subject, and turns discomfort with him into a test of the reader’s willingness to face human nature without cosmetic concealment.

The Case Against the Conventional Hero

The narrator anticipates that readers, especially women, may reject Chichikov as a hero because he is stout, no longer young, and not a figure of moral perfection. The objection is not answered by pretending that he is virtuous. Instead, the narrator argues that the story may still disclose something larger: what he calls the boundless wealth of Russian psychology, represented not only through Chichikov but through other kinds of Russian character, including the peasant endowed with virtues and the spiritually aspiring Russian maiden. The novel’s interest therefore lies not in making its protagonist exemplary, but in setting his compromised character within a broader inquiry into human and national possibilities.

The narrator also explains why he will not simply substitute a conventionally virtuous protagonist. The familiar “man of worth,” he says, has been overused by writers until the type has become a worn-out figure, repeatedly brought onstage and deprived of force. Against that exhausted convention, he proposes yoking a rascal to the shafts. The choice is a literary reversal: instead of presenting virtue as a ready-made answer, the narrative makes a flawed person the means by which moral questions are pursued.

From Villain to Acquirer

The narrator resists the blunt label of villain. He asks why the reader should be so severe toward a fellow human being, then offers a more exact description: Chichikov is an “ACQUIRER,” driven by the love of acquisition and gain. That passion is not presented as harmless. It produces transactions that are “not strictly honourable,” and gives the protagonist’s character an element of ugliness. Yet it is also recognizable: the narrator observes that someone who might enjoy the company of such a person in everyday life could recoil when that same person is made the hero of a novel or play.

This distinction shifts attention from a simple verdict to the forces that shape conduct. The narrator urges the reader to look past immediate distaste and probe the springs of a character. Human personality, in his account, can change suddenly; a destructive growth may take hold and drain away what is essential. A passion need not be grand to become a master: even a petty fixation can displace sacred obligations and make trivial concerns appear supremely important. Chichikov’s acquisitiveness therefore matters not just as a personal defect but as an example of how an ordinary desire can become morally commanding.

Passion, Possibility, and the Unfinished Hero

The narrator contrasts passions that deform with passions that may be noble. A worthy passion, he suggests, can deepen over time and enlarge the soul; other passions may be so bound up with a person’s nature that they cannot simply be renounced. Such forces, whether they remain dark or are transformed into a light for others, must reach their fulfillment in life. The narrator does not declare that Chichikov has already undergone this transformation. Instead, he leaves open the possibility that the force drawing him onward may contain something independent of his conscious will, and that even his cold essence might conceal a potential that will one day inspire humility before divine wisdom.

That possibility unsettles a fixed distinction between the rascal and the morally recoverable person. The hero is neither excused because he may change nor condemned as incapable of change. The narrator’s language holds both possibilities in view: acquisitiveness has already led toward dishonourable dealings, but a human being may contain hidden springs not yet visible in his conduct. The protagonist’s significance rests partly on this unresolved tension, not on a completed moral conversion.

The Reader, Exposure, and the Work’s Method

The narrator says that readers might have approved Chichikov had the author shown him only as he showed himself to the townspeople of N. and to Manilov and the others. The author’s deeper scrutiny alters that response: by probing Chichikov’s hidden thoughts, the narrative reveals what the character would not disclose even to an intimate friend. The problem, then, is not simply whether Chichikov is likable. It is what happens when fiction refuses the pleasing surface on which social approval depends.

The narrator describes readers as preferring attractive representations that let them forget the gross and contemptible parts of human life. He compares this preference to a landowner who does not want to hear that his estate is in trouble, even though the warning could matter to its repair. The landowner instead asks to be left ignorant and spends on diversion money that should have gone toward restoring his affairs. The comparison gives the defense of the rascal hero a practical edge: turning away from unpleasant truths is not neutral when it helps preserve the conditions that require correction.

The same dispute extends from individual morality to public reputation. The narrator anticipates objections from self-described patriots who profit at others’ expense and protest when a book voices bitter truths about the country. Their concern that foreigners might hear of wrongdoing treats exposure as the injury, rather than the conduct exposed. In this way, the choice of a compromised protagonist belongs to the novel’s broader refusal of reassuring appearances. Chichikov makes that refusal personal: readers are asked to inspect a flawed man’s hidden motives rather than retreat into an idealized hero, and the book turns their resistance to such scrutiny into part of its critique.