In narrating the consciousness of his characters, Dick in this novel uses the stylistic techniques of realism: indirect free style mixed with interior monologue. Some of this monologue is as dense with personal associations and private linguistic habits (a kind of Japanese-English seems to dominate) as a page of Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and has much the same effect. It tends to establish the reality of the characters and their world beyond a doubt. Dick is very interesting on the sentence level in this book. In terms of larger structures, Dick eschews an omniscient point of view in favor of a tenuously connected system of narrative foci. He narrates from within whatever consciousness happens to be before the reader at the moment. It is left up to the reader to build a larger pattern of significance from this narrative polyphony.