Related as a first person narrative by Ira Holloway, the novel moves through its 333 pages in the hardback edition with modest breaks at the end of a section, and with a single enlarged capital letter opening the next passage.

Other novels by Butler show clear chapter identities: Each chapter is numbered and begins fresh on a page. They Whisper, however, has no clear "book chapter" divisions; rather, less intrusive breaks between sections parallel the scene divisions in a play or film script, and the reduced blank space interrupting the flow of words allows the mind to hold the novel as more nearly stream-of-consciousness in form.

In They Whisper, as in his other work Butler uses the blends of past and present to create the sense of Ira's reverie flowing forth and back in the stream of consciousness. Sentence structures vary from short grammatical statements to occasional fragments within...