In his essay “Why Write?” John Updike recounts a childhood pastime that involved drawing assorted objects on a sheet of paper and then connecting them with lines “so that they all became the fruit of a single impossible tree.” Such an activity, Updike continues, may be “as deep … as the urge to hear a story from beginning to end, or the little ecstasy of extracting resemblances from different things”; both playful and artistic, this childhood pleasure recurs when he fashions “several disparate incidents or impressions into the shape of a single story.” Essential to creativity, the connecting impulse not only recalls childhood happiness but also produces meaningful fictional patterns that link past and present, a central concern in Updike's writing, especially at the time Olinger Stories was published. As his fictional locale undergoes a shift from the rural Olinger of his youth to suburban Tarbox, the search for continuity in, and connection with, a receding past assumes increasing thematic importance and achieves formal realization in the gathering of the Olinger stories into a single volume whose composite structure reflects the splintered recall of the past as well as the attempt to fashion a new order that counters time's erosion.

Updike's description of the connective or pattern-making faculty relates to the complementary forces that unite all works of fiction: linear or diachronic unity – the force behind narrative continuity – and associative or synchronic unity, a looser but still powerful mode of coherence.