He has seen through his sheep: The Bernese pastor Albert Bitzius wrote as Jeremias Gotthelf about people and their difficulty in getting along with one another. The farmer stories from the Emmental are among the most significant contributions to Swiss literature. They captivated readers even during Bitzius' lifetime, although they were primarily taken seriously beyond the Swiss border, in Germany. In his homeland, however, Gotthelf was often misunderstood, if not systematically downplayed. His storytelling was perceived more like a bubbling mountain stream than a thoughtfully crafted aesthetic work. This study analyzes Gotthelf's satirical novel "The Cheese Factory in the Vehfreude" according to structuralist principles. The aim is not only to expand the interpretative field that the few existing monographic studies on the cheese factory have established around the novel but also to enrich the entire Gotthelf research with the analysis of one of his major works. Through a detailed examination of the spatial and temporal structures in the novel, as well as an analysis of the narrative program of the quête, the author succeeds in presenting the measured aesthetic structure of the novel: narrative art, it turns out, is like cheese-making.