Flashback

Meanings of Literary Device of Flashback

Etymologically, flashback, a cultural term, is a combination of two terms, flash and back. It originated from fires in engines around the beginning of the 20^th century. Later, it came into use in cinematic techniques in 1916. In grammar, it is a noun with plural, flashbacks.

As a literary term, it is mostly used in narratives, movies, and films. This term makes the audiences and readers see an event happening before them after it is inserted into a narrative. It happens in chronological order before its time.

In psychology, it means hallucinations about past events triggered by some traumatic event.

Definition of Literary Device of Flashback

A flashback takes the story back into the past. It is a scene inserted in the present time but shows the past. Therefore, flashbacks make up the back story of the narrative. It is also called analepsis.

Types of Flashbacks

1. Internal Analepsis: It points to an earlier event that happened in the narrative.
2. External Analepsis: This flashback refers to the time that happened before the narrative has come.

Elements of Flashback

A flashback has four integral elements.

1. Movement: It means how much time and space a flashback has taken in bringing changes or a change.
2. Degree: It means the time that a flashback takes in creating a break.
3. Level of Specification: It means whether it is specific or general and has been used to generalize some past event.
4. Vividness: It means the type of frame and the ways it is shown happening before the audiences or readers.

Examples of Flashback in Literature

Example # 1

The Odyssey by Homer

Homer has used the technique of flashback in his poem, the Odyssey. Odysseus is shown in the Phaeacian court when he recounts the journeys that he has taken so far. These journeys make up the story of books 5-12. It means when the story opens the readers find Odysseus in the seventh year after he departs on these journeys. However, Odysseus has left these seven years when he recounts his tales to Alcinous.

Example # 2

From The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway

Now in his mind he saw a railway station at Karagatch and he was standing with his pack and that was the headlight of the Simplon-Orient cutting the dark now and he was leaving Thrace then after the retreat. That was one of the things he had saved to write, with, in the morning at break-fast, looking out the window and seeing snow on the mountains in Bulgaria and Nansen’s Secretary asking the old man if it were snow and the old man looking at it and saying, No, that’s not snow. It’s too early for snow. And the Secretary repeating to the other girls, No, you see. It’s not snow and them all saying, It’s not snow we were mistaken. But it was the snow all right and he sent them on into it when he evolved exchange of populations. And it was snow they tramped along in until they died that winter.

This passage occurs in the short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” written by Ernest Hemingway. He has beautifully inserted several flashbacks in the story at different places and almost all of them are without any sequence or chronological order. This one, too, shows Harry ruminating over his past when he is at the Karagatch railway station and recalling what happened to him in Bulgaria.

Example # 3

From The Handmaid’s Tale by Margret Atwood

But that’s where I am, there’s no escaping it. Time’s a trap, I’m caught in it. I must forget about my secret name and all ways back. My name is Offred now, and here is where I live. Live in the present, make the most of it, it’s all you’ve got. Time to take stock. I am thirty-three years old. I have brown hair. I stand five seven without shoes. I have trouble remembering what I used to look like. I have viable ovaries. I have one more chance.

This passage occurs in the novel of Margret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale. This postmodern presentation of the futuristic ontology is replete with various flashbacks. Here Offred thinks about herself and introduces her persona in a flashback, including her physical features and age.

Example # 4

From Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children’s Crusade by Kurt Vonnegut

Speaking of people from Poland: Billy Pilgrim accidentally saw a Pole hanged in public, about three days after Billy got to Dresden. Billy just happened to be walking to work with some others shortly after sunrise, and they came to a gallows and a small crowd in front of a soccer stadium. The Pole was a farm laborer who was being hanged for having had sexual intercourse with a German woman. So it goes. (Chapter-7)

This passage occurs in the seventh chapter of the novel of Kurt Vonnegut. Although it is, somewhat, semi-autobiographical, it shows his deep observation regarding the character of Billy Pilgrim and his flashbacks about the past and the present. This passage shows Billy reaching Poland and thinking about the German bombing of Dresden.

Example # 5

Flashback in Forrest Gump

Forrest Gump presents examples of flashbacks in the movies. It opens with the protagonist, Forrest Gump, thinking about his life and telling the stories to different audiences who share a bench with him on the road. His recruitment in the army, his visit to Vietnam, his business, and his love all pass on the screen in his flashbacks and narrates his story.

How to Create Flashback

1. Learn using in media res or start a narrative from the middle and then move to childhood including significant events.
2. Plan before narrating a story.
3. Pick the event that becomes a hook. Check that it really hooks the readers or the audiences into the narrative.
4. Try less significant events after the hook and move to the more significant events.
5. End the story on a more significant event, and tie it to the hook.

Benefits of Using Flashback

1. It captures the imagination of the readers.
2. It makes readers and audiences play with their imagination and understand the story in sequence.
3. It jolts the readers into surprise and they stay hooked to the story or the movie.
4. It creates a sense of reality before the audience or the readers.
5. It makes the readers and the audiences construct events in their imagination and feel empathetic to the protagonist after he/she undergoes suffering.

Flashback in Literary Theory

1. As flashback is a frame, it has often been mentioned with reference to contextual frame theory. Other than this, it is an important part of the narrative technique used in cultural theoretical concepts, narratology, cinematography, and postmodernism.
2. It is specifically in indigenous narratives where memory plays an important role in showing colonialism, its retreat, and its aftershocks on the indigenous population.
3. Flashback is also an important feature of postcolonial literature where indigenous, local, or native writers recall the memories of colonial torture, colonial ravages, and colonial devastation and its impacts on the natives.

Suggested Readings

Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction To Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester University Press, 2020. Print.

Hemingway, Ernest. The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Hemingway Library Edition. Simon and Schuster, 2017. Print.

Roth, Eric, and Winston Groom. Forrest Gump. Paramount Pictures, 1994.

Sculley, John, and John A. Byrne. Odyssey. Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1987. Print. Thompson, Michael, Richard Ellis, and Aaron Wildavsky. Cultural theory. Routledge, 2018. Print.

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