Critics have noted the famous “humane passage” which demonstrates a sudden shift in the narration's style from comic to tragic. Though Akaky is not oppressed by his task, he is by his coworkers who treat him “in a coolly despotic way” and “laughed at and made fun of him” to which Akaky usually “answered not a word” until finally he is provoked to exclaim “Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?” in a way “which moved to pity” so that a new worker suddenly “stopped short” as if he had “undergone a transformation”. This young man never forgot Akaky and his “heart-rending words” which carried the unspoken message “I am thy brother.” Remembering Akaky he “shuddered at how much inhumanity there is in man.” Indeed, the coworker's comments underscore one possible interpretation of the story:"How little humane feeling after all was to be found in men's hearts; how much coarseness and cruelty was to be found even in the educated and those who were everywhere regarded as good and honorable men."The narrator's portrayal of Akaky jars the reader, like the young man himself, from carefree mockery to graven sympathy. Gogol is noted for his instability of style, tone, genre among other literary devices, as Boris Eichenbaum notes. Eichenbaum also notes that Gogol wrote “The Overcoat” in a skaz—a difficult to translate colloquial language in Russian deriving from or associated with an oral storytelling tradition.