comment on structure

Elbow Room is an anthology of twelve independent and utterly diverse stories, "Why I like Country Music," "The Story of a Dead Man," "The Silver Bullet," "The Faithful," "Problems of Art," "The Story of a Scar," "I Am an American," "Widows and Orphans," "A Loaf of Bread," "Just Enough for the City," "A Sense of Story," and "Elbow Room." Common themes such as black diversity, overt and covert racial differentiation (including, but not prominently, discrimination and racism), and religion run through the stories, but in no way unify them. Most of the stories are told chronologically, with flashbacks to events that set up and provide context for the main narrative.