The special technique of The Big Money encompasses an entire, implicit metaphysic—the challenge of Being. It is important for another reason, too: thanks to this technique, Dos Passos's trilogy has a temporal structure. The several individual stories composing the trilogy, which are what one is first aware of, are not only different shots of a single reality but moments within a single development. This single development transcends each of them and exists only by virtue of the complex design they all form. It is possible to put them end to end and demonstrate their continuity; the occasional use of flashbacks when the author wants to present the past of a newly introduced character is no more frequent than it is in the movies. The nonnovelistic elements that frame the stories—the Newsreels, the Camera Eyes, the lyrical biographies—are thus seen to have a very important "linking" function: they assure the cosmic as well as the psychological continuity of the narrative. Because of them, the impersonal reality that is the subject of the book—the year 1919 or the economic inflation of the twenties—can unfold without interruption, independent of the individual consciousnesses in which it is embodied, and preserve the mythic quality Dos Passos wanted to achieve. They are like movie background music, which nobody listens to but everybody hears, and which prepares our subconscious for the images to come.
The Newsreels in particular have taken on the major role of the narrative—to measure the rhythm of time, to give us the uninterrupted sound that the film of life makes as it unrolls and winds off the reel behind the scenes. The Newsreels give us the unfolding world events that will have repercussions on the individual destinies of the characters. (pp. 128-29)
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