This essay challenges the long-standing tradition of reading Goethe's Novella as an image-driven narrative. Goethe himself suggests my starting point. He characterizes the novelistic event with explicit recourse to the sense of hearing as something "unheard-of." The unexampled and unresolved something that "makes itself heard" unsettles the desirelogic of the image-world Novella depicts by unveiling the dynamics on which its political economy hinges. The unheard-of character of the narrated event, thus, also effects the narrative form of Novella. It dethrones the narrative voice. Consequently, the readers find themselves confronted with an unprecedented and undecided crisis they have to come to terms with alone, while being denied an outside perspective from which to utter a decision. The unheard-of event is ultimately a narrative-less a narrated-event. Exactly here Novella breaks with its genre.