In a novel such as Heinrich Boll's "The Lost Honour Of Katharina Blum" the structure is integral to achieving the author's objective. Without the particular structuring present, Boll would not have been able to reveal the hypocrisy and injustice he saw within post-WWII Germany. It is heavily reliant on the extended metaphor of "fluidity" to do this, and makes further use of this metaphor to explain, via reader connotation, some of the themes and issues within the novel.

The pervasive "fluidity" metaphor can be applied to the structure of the novel at a superficial level to give the reader an impression of a police report. It does this by relating the sequence of events to the convergent properties of water, mimicking the way in which sources assemble themselves over the course of an investigation. The actual metaphors it uses are introduced in chapter two - the concepts of...