The nose in the bread is the initial strange event. Now we wait to see how the fictive world (in this case, Ivan and his wife, Praskovya Osipovna) will react to it. That’s where the story’s meaning is going to be made—not in the fact of the nose in the bread but in what the couple does about it in response. This world, where a nose can appear in a loaf of bread, is not our world, but it is a world, and there are going to be rules in that world, and we wait to see what they are.
