Why The Nose doesn't measure up to The Overcoat

Well I finished reading Gogo's story "The Nose" and it still eludes me - a barber finds a nose (his customer's!) in a loaf of bread, tosses it in the river; the Russian official wakes up sans nose and spends a day trying to locate it; a policeman shows up at the official's house, nose in hand; the official tries to re-attach the nose, and can't quite manage to get it right; life goes on. It's so weird and will obviously remind many readers of Metamorphosis -  a sudden waking to dramatic and preposterous physical transformation - but aside from the black humor and the pre-Freudian overtones, I don't know what to make of it. Surely none of the characters is portrayed in any depth, and the Russian official doesn't exactly learn from his experience - he is transformed physically, but not in any other way, he doesn't have a moral journey or an insight over the course of the story. I think its real importance is as a trial run for the much finer story The Overcoat, in which the central character, Akaky, is fully drawn and totally sympathetic and pitiable. Both stories use the loss of an object as an "objective correlative" to carry the emotional and perhaps symbolic weight of the story, but only in The Overcoat do we understand the loss of the object. In The Nose, the lose of the appendage is sudden and inexplicable and the character's efforts toward re-attachment are actually kind of gruesome. We should feel bad for him, poor guy - as Gogol notes, the whole story would be quite different had he lost a nose in a duel - but we don't. He's the author's victim, not ours.