Literary structure provided Gogol with a means to free himself from the restrictive definitions of life. As copying clerk, Akaky inhabits a nearly autonomous world of literal repetition, a world close to the timeless silence out of which fiction is born. He is happy, having next to no individualized desiring self. The acquisition of the overcoat causes Akaky's fall into the diachronic world of difference, a hostile world that overwhelms his recently objectified identity. As his letters demonstrate, Gogol himself feared just such an annihilation by the other. Hence his enigmatic, elusive character and his narrative strategy of hiding behind a multiplicity of constantly shifting masks. The “fantastic ending” of the story fulfills Gogol's most cherished fantasy: to exercise power against the world while remaining unconditioned within the play of literary metamorphoses. In psychological terms, this desire is symptomatic of the schizoid, ontologically insecure individual.