In The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Wilder cultivates a formal and deliberately antiquated style. The author wrote this novel in the 1920s but set it some three centuries in the past, purposefully adopting some conventions of 18th-century writing to further distance the narrative from life in his own era. One of those stylistic flourishes is his frequent use of aphorisms, or broad observations that communicate a universal truth. For example, when Esteban discovers that his brother Manuel has fallen in love with the Perichole, thus compromising their fraternal bond, Wilder writes that:
Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other.
This kind of generality dates back to the earliest novels and would have seemed antiquated even when Wilder published The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Likewise, Wilder often categorizes his characters through methodical lists. For example, he declares that Uncle Pio's "life had three aims" and then lays out the character's major aspirations.
These techniques recall older works of literature and deliberate create distance between the novel and its readers. Paradoxically, they also reinforce the timelessness of the novel's main themes, such as love, altruism, free will, and the existence of God. The questions on these subjects that concern the novel's 18th-century protagonists remained relevant—and unanswerable—in Wilder's era, as they do in the current moment. In this sense, Wilder's stylistic techniques communicate that the novel is grappling with universal philosophical problems.
Another stylistic feature of The Bridge of San Luis Rey is Wilder's reliance on summary. The book's omniscient narrator speaks at a great distance from the characters, summarizing their actions rather than depicting them at length in a scene. Dialogue is comparatively rare, and the book often dispenses with years of a character's life in a few sentence: it covers Doña Maria's entire upbringing in a short paragraph that begins with the straightforward declaration, "Her childhood was unhappy." This stylistic choice is crucial to the novel's structure, as The Bridge of San Luis Rey is very short yet covers the complete lives of several characters. Wilder's use of summary also emphasizes that the novel should be read as a moral parable rather than a realistic representation of 18th-century life.
