Even narratives that appear for the most part to tell their tales in the order in which the events they represent occur tend to jump around in time in important ways in the course of individual sentences and passages. Consider, for instance, the following passage from Huckleberry Finn:
I had shut the door to. Then I turned around, and there he was. I used to be scared of him all the time, he tanned [i.e. whipped] me so much. I reckoned I was scared now, too; but in a minute I see I was mistaken. That is, after the first jolt, as you may say, when my breath sort of hitched – he was so unexpected; but right away after, I see I warn’d scared of him worth bothering about.
Had Huck (the narrator) wished to tell us about this encounter in its strict chronological order, his narration might have gone something like this:
I used to be scared of him [my father] all the time, he tanned me so much. On this occasion, I shut the door, turned around, and there he was. My breath sort of hitched – he was so unexpected. But in a minute I saw I was mistaken, I saw I warn’d scared of him worth bothering about.
Loosely speaking, these two passages recount the same event. The difference in the order in which that event unfolds, however, conveys to us as readers a very different sense of what it was like for Huck to experience that event. The first of these passages (the original) is unquestionably more highly and emotionally charged. It is as if the shock of seeing his father is such that it scatters Huck’s thoughts in all kinds of random directions, leaving them to come back to him slowly and in an equally random order. The second passage, by contrast, has none of this emotional impact or immediacy. It is not necessarily less realistic (although some writers and narratologists would argue that our human experience of time tends to be more commonly of this somewhat jumbled up nature as opposed to a sensation of one moment proceeding in an orderly and unbroken fashion to the next like the hands on a clock); rather, whereas the first passage conveys a realistic picture of Huck’s thoughts as they occurred to him at the time of this event (note also in this respect the occasional irruption of the present tense I see), the second passage gives an equally realistic picture, but it is picture not of how Huck processed the shock of seeing his father at that very moment, but of how he might have recalled those events on a subsequent occasion when he found himself in a calmer frame of mind.
Guidelines on how to analyse the ordering of time in a specific passage
The example above shows the value of isolating a particular short passage out of a longer narrative for a closer analysis. You might begin by separating out the individual moments of time evoked in the passage and setting them out both in their chronological order and in the order in which they appear in the narrative. In this case, your schema might look something like this:
Story:
A. I used to be scared of my father
B. I shut the door, turned around and saw my father
C. Seeing my father shocked me
D. I realised I did not need to be afraid and calmed down
Plot:
B. I shut the door, turned around and saw my father
A. I used to be scared of my father
C. Seeing my father shocked me
D. I realised I did not need to be afraid and calmed down
C. Seeing my father shocked me
D. I realised I did not need to be afraid and calmed down
Setting things out in this way can help you a) identify how Huck relates the events of this particular episode (and consider the impact of this way of telling upon the reader) and b) compare and contrast his storytelling technique here with his storytelling technique elsewhere in the novel.