The novel features a narrator who recounts a multitude of dislocated, fragmented stories, which together reveal certain traits and patterns.

[1] Literature professor Michael Butler, in his essay "Identity and authenticity in postwar Swiss and Austrian novels", wrote that Gantenbein marks a different direction in Frisch's writing, as it "possesses a postmodern playfulness" instead of "the serious irony of its predecessors".

Butler wrote: "Scepticism towards the traditional claim of language to structure the world is now seen not as a threat to identity but as liberating the ego from premature restriction.

... What appeared to begin as a postmodern exercise in narrative irony turns into the acknowledgement that happiness can only be won within the confines of empirical reality.

He wrote that the aim was "to show the reality of an individual by having him appear as a blank patch outlined by the sum of fictional entities congruent with his personality.