Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gastby is the very opening line of the novel. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. Therefore, the great bulk of Conrad’s novel occurs in flashback. Since they are not presently working, their fellow sailor Charles Marlow decides to tell them about his experience traveling upriver in the center of Africa to find an ivory trader named Kurtz. This flashback example comes from near the beginning of Heart of Darkness as sailors are at rest on their boat on the Thames. ![]() We looked on, waiting patiently-there was nothing else to do till the end of the flood but it was only after a long silence, when he said, in a hesitating voice, “I suppose you fellows remember I did once turn fresh-water sailor for a bit,” that we knew we were fated, before the ebb began to run, to hear about one of Marlow’s inconclusive experiences. Examples of Flashback in Literature Example #1 ![]() Thus, it’s more ambiguous where the “present moment” really is, and thus it’s harder to say what is flashback, what is present, and what is flash-forward. Other authors, like Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five and Julio Cortázar in Rayuela, choose to tell their stories completely out of chronological order. Some authors have chosen to tell their stories entirely in flashback, such as in Homer’s Odyssey, in which Odysseus tells his story to a listener, or Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in which the character Marlow tells his fellow sailors about a journey he once took up the Congo River. Flashbacks can also create suspense or add structure to a story. Flashbacks can help the reader understand certain motivations that were otherwise unclear, or provide characterization in other ways. One key reason is to fill in elements of one or more characters’ backstories. Authors use flashbacks in their works for many different reasons.
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