Whether the collection has a unified structure has been a source of debate among Hemingway critics. According to Reynolds the collection should be "read as a predictable step in any young author's career" and the pieces considered as "discrete units". Yet he admits that Hemingway's remarks, and the complexity of the structure, suggests the stories and vignettes were meant to be an interconnected whole. In a letter to Pound in August 1923, Hemingway told him he had finished the full set of eighteen vignettes, saying of them, "When they are read together, they all hook up ... The bulls start, then reappear, then finish off. The war starts clear and noble just like it did ... gets close and blurred and finished with the feller who goes home and gets clap." He went on to say of "in our time" that "it has form all right". On October 18, 1924, he wrote to Edmund Wilson, "Finished the book of 14 stories with a chapter of 'In Our Time' between each story – that is the way they are meant to go – to give the picture of the whole before examining it in detail".