The framing narrative introduces us to Honor, a 21-year-old massage therapist who has been hired to treat Milo, a taciturn Iraq war veteran with both a spinal cord injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.
But when she is rescued by an adoring alchemist, the relationship becomes clear: her section of the narrative introduces a story about the art of making cymbals, whose percussive rhythms informed that quintessentially American sound called swing.
A barely discernible narrative introduces the creepy interactions of a bewigged, pill-guzzling doctor (Michael Rogers) and his heavily medicated patient (Eva Allan), a lovely young prisoner who does little except stumble around like a near-catatonic rag doll.
As he moves through a series of apartments, convinced that there is "a grand conspiracy of rooms" against him, the narrative introduces, drops, and periodically reëncounters characters, among them a famous stage actress running a hospital for invalid soldiers; a young man under her care, too traumatized to speak; and a landlady who fills the bathtub with vegetables and dirty linen.
Fortunately, spindle cells, however, are only a tiny part of the narrative, introduced, perhaps, as a sop to Kurzweil's new-agey readers (who read about them before, in language that is almost word-for-word the same, in his 2005 book, "The Singularity is Near").
Two sudden deaths spur Janeway's hunt for the lost library, which is exciting in an erudite way but overshadowed by the remarkable narrative (introduced midbook) of Charles Warren, a Baltimore bibliophile who was befriended by Burton during his visit to America in 1860 and accompanied the explorer on a history-altering trip to Charleston on the eve of the Civil War.
Sometimes episodes in the novel retained in the film's altered narrative introduce elements of absurdity into the plot.
In his review for AllMusic, Unterberger said that, despite its slight flaws, the album has "many excellent songs" permeated with "a suitably powerful grace", while Townshend's ability to devise a lengthy narrative introduced "new possibilities to rock music".
For narratives, introduce the characters and what they have to say.
(Remember the play within the play in "A Midsummer Night's Dream"?) But this one apparently has especially sophisticated narrative skills, introducing Voice to the strange and seductive tale of the title character, whose husband might also be described as commitment challenged.
