Indeed, there are some examples of the exact repetition of events in different chapters/years. Most chapters include the clues as to what has happened since the same day on the previous year, but the narration must concentrate on what is ordinary or typical. The same-day-each-year structure frees the novelist from deciding what the important events in a character's life might be. We infer that this initial encounter will shape the future for both characters.
Reference is made to this several times, reminding us of the folk tradition that the weather on this day will predict the weather for the next 40 days. Choosing this day of the year to head each chapter foregrounds a traditional question for the reader of romantic fiction: will these two ever come back together? The question is made more pressing by the impersonal significance of the date Nicholls has chosen, which is St Swithin's day. It is an anniversary for which there is no name, but which, in a society in which sex before marriage is no longer frowned upon, can be as important as a wedding anniversary. Meanwhile the third-person narrative moves back and forth between their different viewpoints and their different fortunes. They remain in touch and occasionally meet.
Each subsequent chapter falls on the same day of each year that follows, tracking their separate lives through their 20s and 30s. This is the day on which its two main characters, Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew, spend the night together as students. David Nicholls's novel gets its narrative structure from dates – or rather, from one date: 15 July 1988. One Day uses dates for the same two purposes of realism and pattern-making. When Crusoe works out that the date on which he is shipwrecked on his island is the same as his birthday and the same as the day on which he first ran away to sea, he knows that there is a God-given shape to his life. In the first great English novel, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, dates make extraordinary events believable – but also, in a pattern that later novelists were to follow, they make events significant.
Like the diaries and journals that it sometimes imitated, this new kind of fiction used dates to fix its stories in a real world. I n The Rise of the Novel, his brilliant study of the invention of the novel in the 18th century, Ian Watt notes that one of its novelties was to include dates.
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