Biographer Benoît Peeters thought that "The Broken Ear" was a return to "pure adventure" from the "quasi-documentary realism" of "The Blue Lotus", and that in this "Adventure", politics remains "in the second line", and that instead Hergé let "the narrative rip and succeeds marvellously". Elsewhere, he praised the work as having a "formidable dynamism" and an "unequaled vitality", containing a "revolution" in narrative structure. He thought that it served as a "perfect metaphor" for the theories of German philosopher Walter Benjamin published in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936), which Hergé had not read.