This novel is not told in a straightforward, chronological, omniscient manner, like many nineteenth-century novels. Instead, it is composed of a collage of letters, journal entries and diary jottings, in addition to a portion of a ship's log, various newspaper clippings, and even a "phonograph diary." Since the story is basically a mystery, this technique is highly effective in sustaining suspense, for there are literally dozens of narrative pieces for readers to fit together before they can see the complexity of the novel resolved and the entirety of Stoker's pattern. Stoker most likely borrowed this approach to his novel from Wilkie Collins, who used the same technique in his "detective" novel The Woman in White (1860).
Jonathan Harker's journal entries begin on May 3, sometime in the late nineteenth century. The young London lawyer has been traveling by train across Europe and is currently in Budapest, in route to Count Dracula's estate, located somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania — the "land beyond the forest." Harker has been sent by his London law firm to complete the final transactions for a transfer of real estate, which the Count has recently purchased in England, and thus far, Harker is very pleased with his trip. He is favorably impressed with Budapest, and he remarks that already he can tell that he is leaving the Western world behind him and that he is "entering the East," a section of Europe whose peoples and customs will be, for the most part, strange and unfamiliar.
At the beginning of his journey, the tenor of his narrative is low-key — that is, Harker records what he contemplates, what he sees, and what he eats (in regard to the latter, he jots off a couple of reminders to himself to obtain certain recipes for his fiancée, Mina Murray).
