Although the primary action of the novel takes place in 1961, there are extended flashbacks to the Indian civilization that existed in Mexico fifteen hundred years before, to Spain in the sixteenth century, to Virginia during the American Civil War in the 1860s, and to Mexico during its revolution in the early twentieth century. The purpose of these flashbacks is to show how the characters present in 1961 have been influenced by history and by their various ancestors.

Besides flashback, Michener employs several other techniques to reinforce the idea that the past directly influences the present and to suggest that history is constantly in the process of being written. For example, the narrator Norman Clay is a reporter for a magazine published in New York and has been sent by his editor to Toledo, a fictional town in Mexico, in order to cover a bullfighting festival. As the reporter Clay...