Shaara's mastery of the short story may have contributed to the unusual format he used in The Killer Angels. He divided the novel into four major sections, one each to the three days of the battle and the first to June 29, 1863, as the armies groped their way through southern Pennsylvania, encountering one another at Gettysburg by mistake.

Each section is comprised of many selfcontained units, each told from the perspective of one of Shaara's major figures, alternating between North and South. Although some readers feel dislocated by these rapid shifts in perspective, Shaara achieves a powerful cinematic effect, undeniably conveying the dizzying reality of a battlefield engaging one-hundred- and-fifty-thousand men in an area more than five miles long.