Frazier is an instructor of high school and college English literature and composition. In this essay, he analyzes the relation of Wideman's structure to his themes.

John Edgar Wideman's short story, "The Beginning of Homewood," is a complex assembly of smaller stories that the narrator attempts to meaningfully string together. The many stories he tells appear in the letter written from the narrator to his brother, imprisoned for life for a murder to which he was an accomplice. That letter is the short story "The Beginning of Homewood." His brother's fate prompts the narrator into "trying to figure out why I was on a Greek island and why you were six thousand miles away in prison and what all that meant and what I could say to you about it." Feeling he must say something to his brother ("the only person I needed to write was you...