Because the story leaps years or even decades at a time, "The Brown Chest" has a fractured sense of time in its narrative. The way the narrator jumps back and forth between his youth and maturity, and how he interprets the world differently at each point, demonstrate the fractured timeline. Even though he didn't care for the old pictures, clothes, and trinkets when he was younger, as he gets older he treasures them. These books had thick pages with gold edges, thick enough to accommodate stiff brown photographs of deceased people—often oval—on both sides. Even as his mother was explaining these albums to him, he still didn't enjoy going through them.