Although she was initially enthusiastic and committed, her pedagogical life sometimes intruded on her fledgling literary aspirations, leading her to question her volunteer role.

For the petit bourgeois with literary aspirations, the war represented an opportunity for fraternizing with educated men that had hitherto been impossible.

One scholar describes the book as a story about language, such as the dialect of the illiterate people, and the literary aspirations of the dragon.

As time went by, though, he showed less and less enthusiasm, for the demands of his position had come to feel like a major hindrance to his literary aspirations.