The story uses verbal and situational irony—gaps or contradictions between expectations and reality—to explore the failures of the aristocracy and the military. After inviting the general and the officers to his home, Chertokutsky repeatedly says that he is leaving to go home and prepare for the next day’s party, but he does not actually leave for many hours. As a result, there is no dinner waiting for the visitors the following day, and Chertokutsky’s plans to increase his social capital collapse. Additionally, in an ironic subversion of readerly expectation, it is revealed at the end of the story that Chertokutsky’s carriage, which he describes as “extraordinary” and “amazing,” is actually just an average carriage. Gogol thus employs irony to suggest that there is nothing meaningful or authentic about promises or declarations made by people like Chertokutsky and to highlight The Performance of Class.

In addition to mocking the shortcomings of the gentry, Gogol satirizes (or comically exposes) a number of customs, beliefs, and institutions throughout the story, including those associated with rural, unsophisticated village life. Describing a “fashionable board fence [standing] all by itself” in the town of B—, for example,