Heinrich Böll uses his novel, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, to attack modern journalistic ethics as well as the values of contemporary Germany. The structure of this novel is important to conveying his message. He uses a police report format, differences in chapter lengths, narrator or author intervention, a subtitle, and the extensive use of the ‘puddle’ metaphor. All these things contribute towards the message in the text. The puddle metaphor is the most significant device used in the structure of the novel. The “puddle” means the collective information from all the sources. The narrator speaks of