Old Testament, New Testament, and Gogol's Overcoat

I'm sure others have remarked on this, but let me point out that in Nicolai Gogol's story "The Overcoat" there's a very strange turn of events toward the end: the civil servant-clerk Akaky, having given all of his life's savings to purchase the new tailor-made overcoat that he desperately needs, goes out to a party that some of his office mates have set up to celebrate the new overcoat - of course, they are rather cruelly mocking him, this poor guy who gets so little pleasure out of life, who suffers their scorn - and on the way home two thugs rob him and, oddly, take the coat (they don't even seem to ask him for money). He spends the next few days going to the police and eventually to some high-ranking government official in the vain hope of starting a police investigation to retrieve his coat. Nobody notices his plight, nobody cares, and the official berates him so fiercely that he literally becomes ill, and, in a few days, dies. It takes his office a few more days to realize this, but they quickly replace him. Gogol has a very beautiful passage toward the end, in which he notes that Akaky had a sad and struggling life but had one moment of golden joy when he possessed, for a few days, this beautiful coat - which was taken from him. How odd - the coat itself is a Christ symbol, and the story, up to this point, something like a New Testament parable (or allegory): the coat is like the savior who enlightens the dark world for a very short span and then is ripped from us and ascends, leaving the world changed and open to grace. Even the nasty high-ranking official tries wanly to make amends when he learns of Akaky's death. And then - Gogol (and I know nothing about his politico-religious views) is too shrewd to leave this as a Xtian parable, for in the very last part of the story there are appearances of a ghost throughout St. Petersburg who steals people's overcoats - and at last we see the ghost, the returned vision of Akaky come from the dead, to peel the coat of the would-be repentant official. Now we're back in the Old Testament - and the God is a jealous God, seeking vengeance rather than peace and salvation. It's a funny, as in odd, story - seeming for most of the way very much like a precursor to Dostoyevsky, realistic and sordid and dramatic - but in the last few pages becomes a fantasy, a ghost story - and a precursor to, whom? - probably Bulgakov a century later and maybe to IB Singer and the great Yiddish writers in exile. We believe in the ghost of Akaky primarily because the story up to that point was so realistic, credible, and narrated as if by a living witness.