Let the Great World Spin--Time

We skip forward and backward through time as we move from chapter to chapter. And yet, the passage of time and its effect on the characters is an important theme in the book. We experience Tillie's life in its entirety but only a few minutes of Sam's life. How does the author use time as a narrative device? Is life just a series of moments frozen in time that we can revisit, like Adelita and her memories of Corrigan? Or, is it an unstoppable force, forever marching forward, like Jaslyn describes in the final chapter: “We stumble on, thinks Jaslyn, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough. … The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough” (p. 349)?