Examples of Fragmented Narrative: Part I

This is when the story is all over the place. We just get bits of it from past and present and future and have to work out what happened and in what order for ourselves. Joseph Heller uses this extensively in the novel Catch-22. There was never an official time line and any made by someone else would have taken lots of work and still wouldn’t have been accurate. Heller reportedly tried to make a time line after he had written the book “to make sure everything was in order” and found he had made a significant contradiction at one point, … Continue reading Examples of Fragmented Narrative: Part I

Example’s of Flashbacks

This is when the narrative moves back in time. The Phantom of the Opera is told in one giant flashback, as the show’s opening scene is of the aged Raoul attending an auction selling off items from the opera house. Miss Saigon goes back to “The Fall of Saigon” midway through the second act Harry Potter has the Pensieve and Tom Riddle’s diary, allowing for magical plot important flashbacks. In The Dark Tower, Book One: The Gunslinger, the first quarter of the novel is devoted to flashbacks to events just prior to the beginning of the novel, and flashbacks to Roland’s childhood within those. In Book … Continue reading Example’s of Flashbacks