Time Out of Order: Flashback and Foreshadowing

1The text: an hour in one woman's life

Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" (1894) is barely a thousand words long, and every one of them works. Here is its first sentence:

Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death.

What happens (summary). Louise Mallard's sister Josephine and her husband's friend Richards tell her that her husband, Brently, has been killed in a railway accident. She weeps, then goes alone to her room and sits in an armchair facing an open window. Outside she sees the trees "all aquiver with the new spring life". Slowly, and almost against her will, a feeling rises in her, and she whispers it: "free, free, free!" Her husband had been kind and had loved her; yet she now looks forward to years that will belong to her alone. She remembers that "It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long." She comes downstairs at last, triumphant. At that moment the front door opens, and in walks Brently Mallard, "a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella". He had been far from the accident and had not even heard of it. Louise dies on the spot. The story ends:

When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease—of the joy that kills.

Kate Chopin, "The Story of an Hour" (1894)

2Foreshadowing in "The Story of an Hour"

• The first clause. "afflicted with a heart trouble" is presented as a reason for gentleness, but it plants the cause of the ending. A careful reader keeps the heart in mind.
• "Heart" in two senses. Her physical heart is weak; her emotional heart is in turmoil. The ending joins the two meanings.
• The open window and spring. New life outside foreshadows the new life she imagines, which makes its loss crueller.
• "life might be long". She now prays for a long life: dramatic irony, since the reader feels that something will prevent it.

Irony at the end. The doctors believe she died of joy at seeing her husband alive. The reader, who has been inside her room, knows the opposite: she died of the shock of losing her freedom. Foreshadowing prepares us for the death; the point of view gives us the knowledge that turns it into irony. This is situational irony (the outcome reverses what was expected) and also dramatic irony (we know what the other characters do not).

3Flashback and the order of telling

Writers often tell events out of time order. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) begins: "1801.—I have just returned from a visit to my landlord—the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with." The speaker, Lockwood, is a stranger; to understand the violent household he has visited, he must hear the past from the housekeeper, Nelly Dean. Most of the novel is her long flashback, framed by Lockwood's present.

Achebe uses flashback on a smaller scale. Things Fall Apart opens with Okonkwo's present fame and then moves back to the wrestling match that made him famous as a young man, and further back to his father Unoka's life and debts. These early flashbacks explain the man before the plot begins to move: we understand his fear of failure because we have seen its cause.