NON-AFRICAN DRAMA NIKOLAI GOGOL: The Government inspector Discuss the theme of deception in the play.

Answer Details

Deception is the engine that drives Gogol's The Government Inspector. The whole action springs from a single mistake, and every character then either practises deceit or is deceived by it, so that the play becomes a comic anatomy of a corrupt society that lives by pretence.

The founding deception: mistaken identity. The Mayor receives a warning that an inspector is coming from St. Petersburg, travelling incognito. The frightened officials seize on Hlestakov, a penniless clerk stranded at the inn because he has gambled his money away, and mistake him for the dreaded inspector. Hlestakov never seriously claims the title at first; the officials deceive themselves through guilty fear. This self-deception is the play's central irony: the swindlers are swindled by their own bad consciences.

Hlestakov as impostor. Once he grasps his luck, Hlestakov actively plays the role. He accepts bribes as "loans", boasts monstrously of dining on soup shipped from Paris, of writing works attributed to famous authors, and of running government departments. His lying grows so extravagant that it exposes the gullibility of his hosts, who swallow every absurdity because they are desperate to please the man they believe can ruin them.

Deception among the officials. Every official is himself a fraud. The Judge takes bribes in the form of greyhound puppies; the Charity Commissioner Zemlyanika lets patients die and slanders his colleagues; the Postmaster opens private letters; the schools and hospitals are shams dressed up for inspection. Their whole administration is a performance staged to hide rot, so deception is not accidental but the normal condition of their public life.

Deception in love and ambition. Hlestakov deceives both the Mayor's wife Anna and his daughter Marya, flirting with mother and daughter in turn before hastily proposing to Marya. The Mayor, already dreaming of a general's rank and a house in the capital, is deceived into believing his family's fortune is made.

The unmasking. The deceptions collapse in two devastating strokes. The Postmaster intercepts Hlestakov's letter to his friend Tryapichkin, in which he mocks each official by name and reveals he is a nobody. The self-deceivers are exposed to one another in a scene of humiliation. Then the Gendarme announces that the real Inspector has arrived, freezing the cast in the celebrated dumb show. The pretenders are trapped by the very machinery of surveillance they had tried to cheat.

Conclusion. Through layer upon layer of deceit, self-deception, imposture and unmasking, Gogol shows that a community built on bribery and hypocrisy is peculiarly easy to deceive, because it is already deceiving itself. Deception is therefore both the comic mechanism and the moral target of the play.