At first glance, the author discards most unnecessary summary and relies predominantly on scene to tell his story. He glues the scenes together successively, taking little slices of life over a number of years, to tell the tale of love, loss, and growing apart. The story seems to move quickly through the past (time in the hospital and introduction) through a present (the front - when He went off to fight the war) and the future (when he caught gonnorrhea in the loop department store. The way that the author arranged the pieces, they move like the bottom end of a pendulum through the expanse of the birth and death of a relationship.
The author seems to use a lot of subtext (as almost the entire story is an understatement). Never does either character say anything, so subtext is a necessary piece of the plot, without which, the story couldn't really successfully be told, I think. We get some insight into Her through the letters she sends, and one or two short phrases ("He felt sick about saying goodbye like that"), but not much else. We have to infer from the fact that he subsequently has sex in the back of a car with a salesgirl, how devastated he is at the loss of his love, and that he probably thought it was the love of a lifetime.
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