Women are sluts and prostitutes. There is even a passing reference to "hollow men". Clearly Mr. Ackroyd shares Eliot's high regard for the language of the Renaissance and for Elizabethan and Jacobean drama." "The basic principle at work here derives directly from Eliot's "The Waste Land", a poem that juxtaposes the past with the present to show the continuity of history. Those who are infected with the Black Death are called "Hollow Men", after the famous poem by Eliot. Dyer's reflection on the quandaries of temporality virtually paraphrases a famous passage from Eliot's "Four Quartets" (1942) [...]: "What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make an beginning." "Hawksmoor" is divided into a prologue and two untitled parts of six untitled chapters each. The odd-numbered chapters are first-person narrations by Nicholas Dyer in 18th-century London, while the even-numbered chapters take place in the 1980s and are told by an omniscient narrator, from the perspective of a tour guide through London and the murder victim Thomas Hill (chapter 2), the murder victim Ned (chapter 4) and Nicholas Hawksmoor (chapters 6, 8, 10 and 12). This clear pattern is deliberately obscured by a "pattern of echo and repetition". There are numerous parallels in characters, actions and descriptions between the chapters taking place in the 18th and those taking place in the 20th century. "They escape any effort at organization and create a mental fusion between past and present." For example, the same fragments of popular songs, ballads, and poems are heard in the streets of London in both historical periods. This structure of repetitions and references underlines the peculiar theory of time the novel transports: "As we go on reading, we find more and more [...] reduplications of names, events, actions, and even identical sentences uttered by characters who live two centuries apart, until we are forced to conclude that, in the novel, nothing progresses in time, that the same events repeat themselves endlessly, and that the same people live and die only in order to be born and to live the same events again and again, eternally caught in what appears to be the ever-revolving wheel of life and death. This interchangeability of characters and the circularity of events is stressed by the device of using the same words to end and to begin adjacent chapters. One of the most characteristic attributes of "Hawskmoor" is the first-person narration by Nicholas Dyer.