Updike's approach in writing Toward the End of Time can aptly be described as a juxtaposition of the artificially symmetrical and the jubilantly random. Ostensibly the story is organized around a single calendar year: 2020. Each section of the book corresponds to a season. Important plot developments often coincide with calendar patterns, such as Ben's attending church with Deirdre on Easter, or the Lynne gang's charging people a toll to cross Turnbull land to view Fourth of July fireworks.

Updike also introduces several sections with lyrical accounts of the changing seasons.

Late in the novel, Ben describes the novel itself as a "journal dedicated to the year's passing."

This chronological structure has its origins in the classical unities of Greek drama, as well as such modernist masterpieces as James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Both of those narratives are scrupulously organized, in the present tense at least...