 Hatch found that although the stories "owe much in their design to the expressive features and general structural patterns of the oral story-telling tradition", she also saw a distinct resemblance to the work of Guy de Maupassant, who, along with Victor Hugo, was much admired by Dadié.Martial Kokroa Frindéthié comments that "Francophone African expressive prose is very digressive and repetitive", and illustrates this with citations from "The Pitcher", one of the stories involving an orphan—in this case, a boy, Koffi, who broke his stepmother's pitcher and is forced to leave home.The ideas of leaving and suffering are repeated in consecutive paragraphs; the paragraphs have recurring coordinate sentences, and the sentences have recurring verb clusters.