The author examines the relationship between the narrator and the reader in Wilhelm Raabe's Im alten Eisen (1887) both as an aspect of narrative structure and as a reflection of social and cultural criticism. Using W. Iser's concept of the "implied reader", the interpretation progresses from an investigation of Raabe's actual readers to a Im alten Eisen is linked to its unusual synthesis of the fairy-tale and the novelistic genres and to its parody of the family-journal novels of E. Marlitt.