Enos belongs to a run of very brief books, Enos, Jarom and Omni among them, that carry the small plates record forward across several generations with only a fraction of the space Nephi and Jacob had used. Each author in this stretch explains, briefly, why he is writing little: the record was never meant to hold a complete history, and each keeper adds only what he judges necessary before passing the plates on. This makes the run of short books function almost as a chronicle or king list more than a sustained narrative, marking the passage of generations rather than dramatizing them.
Despite their brevity, these books carry real narrative weight in the larger structure of the Book of Mormon: they are the thread that connects the founding generation under Lehi and Nephi to the later discovery of the people of Zarahemla and the transition, in Mosiah, to Mormon's abridgment of the large plates, which makes up the bulk of the rest of the book.
Read together, Enos, Jarom and Omni cover roughly two centuries of Nephite history in only a few pages, a compression that later readers have used to argue both for and against the plausibility of the record as an authentic long-transmitted document, since so little detail survives from so long a stretch of time.