NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES
How to Use Flashback Narrative Technique
Use the Flashback technique to introduce more depth and complexity to your characters and plot
To get to the president’s office to close the most important deal of his life, he was walking down a walkway in a beautiful garden.
He heard his sleek, polished shoes crunch on the pebbles when suddenly the smell of wet grass brought him back to his childhood. When he wore football boots and his wool uniform pinched his skin. He remembered his father watching him enter the field through the fence along with the parents of his teammates.
Any writer can make their readers travel through time. The machine for traveling into the past of the characters is called Flashback.
What is the Narrative Technique of Flashback?
This technique is one of the most known in the narrative; it is also called analepsis or retrospection.
The narrative technique of the Flashback rewinds the structure of the narration.
It creates an alteration in the time sequences. Flashback takes characters or things back to the story’s beginning to give more details about the narration or its characters.
Why is the Narrative Technique of Flashback useful?
This narrative technique allows the writer to show facts that happened before a particular moment in the narration.
In addition, it also allows filling the gaps in the information the reader has about some crucial facts. For instance, a flashback on the origins of a character shows the viewer the key elements that contributed to their development during their growing years.
Further, it is also useful to create that sense of suspense and better know the behavior and habits of a character by giving more information about him.
To sum up, this is a useful technique to create the so-called “plot twist“.
Be careful to use it. Flashback, if carelessly used, could confuse the reader and create a complication in the plot. The crucial thing to always keep in mind is persistence and consistency with the narration.
The function of the flashback is Freudian…You have to let them wander like the imagination or like a dream.
Examples of the narrative technique of Flashback
One of the most famous and important examples of flashbacks is in the “Odyssey”. Ulysses tells his past vicissitudes at the court of Alcinoo, king of the Phaeacians.
In a more recent narrative opera, Harry Potter, the writer J.K. Rowling introduces the “Pensieve Memory”. It’s an object that Silente can use to put in his memories and to relive them in a second moment. These memories are all represented as flashbacks.
Conclusions
The narrative technique of the Flashback allows introducing many details about the story.
The reader can better understand the relationship between a character and the background, motivations, and perspective of a character.
Subsequently, the writer interrupts the chronological and linear order of a narrative to introduce more depth and complexity to the story. And again, he can create surprise or suspense.
Think about one of these elements and try to apply it in your narration!
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