Point of View

Ivo Andrić characterizes his novel as a "chronicle" of his native Bosnia and writes as a contemporary of the characters depicted at the end of the book. Most of the time, Andrić narrates in the third-person past tense, but occasionally (briefly and sporadically) shifts into the present tense, although this could well be a peculiarity introduced by the translator, Lovett F. Edwards. Andrić's highest concern, it seems, is reveling in the beauty of the land and the homogeneity of the culture, despite religious, political, and ideological divisions. The translator's foreword notes that Andrić spends much of his childhood in Višegrad, which has changed little even in the late 1950s.

Dialog, that is to say conversations among characters, is relatively unimportant in the novel, and uses whatever tense is relevent to the context. Diatribe, on the other hand, is frequent, put in the mouths of...