Structure

Although parts of The Devil’s Highway are strikingly linear in their chronology, the book’s desire to tell a more complicated, nuanced story—one that, in Urrea’s words, “bear[s] witness” to the tragic deaths of the Yuma 16 forces the novel to adopt a more complicated temporal structure as well. The first chapter alone demonstrates this tension, between telling a historically based and thoroughly researched chronological account and telling a human interest story that revolves around people, rather than events. Thus, the first chapter opens with the five men; however, it deviates from a chronological telling of the events in the desert by first describing the myths and legends surrounding this desert. In this sense, the reader is introduced to the dual function of this novel. It is telling both a story about men and their desires, as well as a story about the environment...