| Flashback (literary Technique) |
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Analepsis allows a narrative's discourse to re-order the story by "flashing back" to an earlier point in the story. In the opposite direction, a Flashforward or '''prolepsis''' reveals events that will occur in the future. A variation of prolepsis is Prophecy , as when Oedipus is told that he will sleep with his mother and kill his father. As we learn later in Sophocles ' play, he does both despite his efforts to evade his fate. A good example of both analepsis and prolepsis is the first scene of '' La Jetée ''. As we learn a few minutes later, what we are seeing in that scene is a flashback to the past, since the present of the film's diegesis is a time directly following World War III . However, as we learn at the very end of the film, that scene also doubles as a prolepsis, since the dying man the boy is seeing is, in fact, himself. In other words, he is proleptically seeing his own death. We thus have an analepsis and prolepsis in the very same scene. Analepsis was used extensively by Author Ford Madox Ford . The 1927 book '' The Bridge Of San Luis Rey '' by Thornton Wilder is the progenitor of the modern disaster epic in literature and film-making, where a single disaster intertwines the victims, whose lives are then explored by means of flashbacks to events leading up to the disaster. Flashbacks were also used in Robert Ludlum 's novel The Janson Directive . In a story if flashbacks are presented non-chronologically it can be ambiguous what is the present of the story: if flashbacks are extensive and in chronological order, one can also say that these form the present of the story, while the rest of the story consists of flash forwards. SEE ALSO |
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