Harington uses a unique method of narration to indicate the joining of past and present. He unifies the story's action and its telling by dividing his novel into "Movements" rather than into chapters.

He labels the three main movements "Beginning," Middling," and "Ending."

From one point of view, then, everything in the novel, although printed and apparently always the same, is in motion, like music or like the sound of the human voice. As if to emphasize this quality, the novel begins with a sound, the "WRIRRAANG" of the spring on a screen door being "pushed outward in a slow swing."

Harington also visually heightens the reader's awareness of the past and present through the use of different type fonts and different verb tenses and moods. Both the "Beginning" and "Ending" are printed primarily in italic type and suggest the world of Stay More in 1939. The narrator's comments...