Often one finds themselves in the middle of a novel or short story engaged in one goal. To simply read the work for its face value and mere words printed on paper to reach the climactic and almost certain moral value that we hope all stores will have in the end. Consider the following passage by Wolfgang Hildesheimer from his short story of Why I Transformed Myself into a Nightingale:
             My father was a zoologist. Because he thought the literature on batrachia was incompetent and rather inaccurate, he spent his life writing a multivolume study on the subject which became famous in scholarly circles. This work never really appealed to me, although we had lots of frogs and salamanders at home whose lives and patterns of development would have merited my study.
             My mother had been an actress before she married, and she achieved her greatest triumph as Ophelia at the Zwickau State Theater; she never surpassed this high watermark. To this I owe my name Laertes, certainly a euphonious but somewhat peculiar name. Nevertheless, I am grateful that she didn't name me Polonius or Guildenstern---but of course it doesn't matter now.
             When I was five years old, my parents gave me a magic set. I learned how to make a certain amount of childish magic before I could read or write. With the powder and instruments contained in the kit, I could turn colorless water red and back to colorless water again, halve a wooden egg simply by turning it upside down (while the other half disappeared without a trace), and make a handkerchief change colors by pulling it through a ring. In short, there wasn't anything in the kit---as is the case with most toys---which represents reality in the miniature. The manufacturer of this toy seemed intent on ignoring the educational value and suppressing the child's awakening sense of utility. This experience had a decided influence on my later development in that the joy of chan...