The story is told as a first-person narrative because we enter a character's mind. Each chapter is devided into five sections and each section is told from the point of view of one of the characters. It is linear like a list as if the author wanted readers can read easily his story. The narrator focuses on each character to show they are all important. This is a real trip inside characters' mind.

        Within each section of each chapter, Douglas Coupland begins in the present tense but then, he goes back to past. This method is called ''analepsis''. There are flashbacks, a retrospective narration within a story or an incursion into the past. It troubles the perspective of the novel and confuses any sense of linear time.

        To ponctuate the difference between the writer and the narrator, Coupland presents characters' thoughts in italics except for Rachel who does not express any thought. She has no emotion but is capable to detect emotion in the voice of other characters. It is similar to how people communicate online without seeing one another, like over email.

         The five characters narrate each hour as the novel counts down to a catastrophic event. Besides, Coupland plays with time presenting a novel that can be read in five hours, as he did in presenting it at 2010’s Massey Lecture. People are now so busy testing, downloading movies and songs or go on social networks that they have no time anymore to read a book. They are disconnected from the real world. For example, they can be more sensitive about character's death in a movie than the death of a real person.

         Then, we can conclude that Player One is not a standard narrative and this novel is really realistic.