The instruments in this chapter assume a reader who reads the book once, in the order printed, and builds a single model of its world as she goes. The order chart measures how far the text departs from that world’s chronology; the strand table measures what each departure costs and gives. Both describe a reader who does not yet know the story order and is assembling it. A rereader holds the whole chronology from the first page, and for her an arrangement of times is no longer a puzzle or a source of suspense but a set of juxtapositions: this scene beside that one, this year set against that. That a non-linear book can be reread with pleasure, as Slaughterhouse-Five and Wuthering Heights are, is evidence that its arrangement was never only a way of delaying information. It was a set of claims about which times belong together.
That is the chapter’s argument. An arrangement of times is an argument about time, made by placing one moment beside another that chronology would have kept apart, and it is judged as an argument is, by whether its juxtapositions say something chronology could not. The three conditions in the governing claim, a question for each strand, a reader who knows where she is, and a meeting that changes meaning, are the conditions under which a reader can follow the argument and feel its force. Where they fail, the reader receives the costs of an arrangement, every update and every switch, without its claims.
The household revision illustrates the economy. It cut six chapters of the father’s last weeks and added one heading, and found that the book’s argument about time was already in place: a man’s last ordinary day at the start, his son’s first evening with the ledger near the end, and between them four months of the living, joined by a page on which one hand stops and another begins. The arrangement says that the father’s March and his children’s July are one record read at different times, which is the book’s subject.
See also: the full treatment, section 8, on the limits of the model; Series and Genre (Chapter 17), for arrangements across volumes; The Structural Edit (Chapter 18), which puts the order chart into a revision order for the whole book.