Flashbacks and flashforwards


Few, if any, narratives tell their stories in a strictly chronological order (see here). Pretty much all of them will at some or other point contain a memory, or flashback, to something that happened in the past. Some narratives – though this, admittedly, is much rarer – will also look ahead to something that will take place after the events currently being described are over. (This latter device tends to be lumbered with the rather ungainly label flashforwards).

The technical term for a flashback is analepsis. The technical term for a flashforward is prolepsis.

As with most literary devices of these kinds, the effects of these flashforwards and flashbacks can vary from instance to instance. What they almost all have in common, though, is that they establish some kind of relationship between the present and the past (in the case of flashbacks) and the present and the future (in the case of flashforwards). They can help us see, for instance, how an action taken in the narrative present may either come to affect the future in a profound way or be a futile gesture that makes no real difference whatsoever. On the other hand, they can help us see how something which took place in the past continues to affect the narrative present, how it might in some way be overcome or resolved in the course of the action described, or how it might represent something still valuable but ultimately unrecoverable in the present moment.

In short, by connecting events that take place in the narrative present with either the past or the future, flashforwards and flashbacks affect our interpretation of those events.

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