For some reason, this structure seems to be popping up in my reading material a lot lately:
Book begins with prologue in which the protagonist is old, often in unpleasant circumstances.
Dire things are said to have happened in protagonist’s life.
Chapter 1 starts in protagonist’s childhood.
(Optional) Book ends with epilogue in which protagonist is old.
I don’t like this structure at all, mostly because it strikes me as unnecessary and I loathe clunky foreshadowing. I don’t like spoilers. I don’t like knowing the protagonist will survive, especially if the prologue is a grim or horrifying setting. If I know how it turns out, I don’t much care how it got there.
But it’s in a lot of books, so it must be a popular way of framing a novel. Do you like it?
Not really. I also don’t like the similar setup where the main character starts off with, “So here I am, hanging from a cliff with ancient Venusian monsters chasing me- Well, I’d better start at the beginning…” cut to a week before
I seem to remember that being a staple of juvenile fiction. It irritated me then too.
I’m okay with it. If I know that the protagonist survives, I can relax and enjoy the story. Otherwise I spend too much time worrying about how it’s going to end. When I’m thinking ahead like that, I feel like I’m missing out.
I guess beginnings and middles are my favorite parts of most books.
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
It doesn’t bother me. The author has chosen for you to know that the protagonist survives (or doesn’t), and I can’t think of a better way of letting you know. It worked really well in Forrest Gump, where he gets up and continues living after telling his whole life story.
Playing around with the order of the story is fine unless it seems to be done for the sake of it. The movie 21 grams crossed the line. William Burrough’s “cut-up” novels are the most extreme example I’ve come across.
The one that’s always got me is “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…”. It’s such a simple statement, and never expanded on (in the movies, at least), but it adds a legendary feeling to the whole Star Wars saga.
It’s not just that the protagonist survives. A lot of the time it’s “Oh, he survives but his life really really really really sucks. Have fun reading!”
I don’t know. Seems to me I’ve read some that I liked, and some that I didn’t, and the flashback part wasn’t the deciding factor either way.
Having said that, John Grisham’s A Painted House is a book which I read which had that structure which I didn’t like. Well, actually, I enjoyed the book, I just didn’t respect the book. I ended up feeling irritated by the degree of specificity with which the narrator remembered details “Baseball team A’s (Player Name) was up to bat with two balls and a strike when he hit the ball over to right field and (player name) ran towards second” (NOT a real quote. I don’t remember the details that well)
It wasn’t just details like that the bothered me. There also wasn’t really much of a set-up or epilogue, so I ended up feeling it could have been a better book if the “frame” had just appeared on the cover of the book.
In fairness, a sneaking suspicion that the book was published and popularized as much as it was just because it was a (non legal thriller) by John Grisham may have been a factor. Like I said above, I enjoyed it while I was reading it, I just was bothered by the excessive details for a story consisting of events remembered by a child. The fact that Grisham himself blurred the line between truth and fiction by saying that the book was based on events from his childhood didn’t help. I don’t think he was claiming the book was non-fiction, or a memoir, but he seemed to think people would want to read it more if they believed it was true, and that bugged me a little.
Of course, it may be worth noting that while I’ve read a half dozen or so books by Grisham, and enjoyed them more than not, there is a part of me that is annoyed by his popularity, maybe it feels like he tries to sensationalize things a little too much. I’m not sure.
I’m not familiar with those, but Kate Atkinson jumped around a lot in Case Histories. The book is about three crimes that occurred over a space of about 25 years, and the back-and-forth structure added nothing. It didn’t actually hurt the story, but IMHO it was an unnecessary gimmick.
I wanted to separate the pages and put them in order.
Well, I can think of better ways. The author could tell the story in the first person; the narrator could drop in a comment along the lines of “In his old age, when Jack thought back on all of this…”; the author could just come right out and tell you whether the protagonist survives.
I tend to be on the side of the OP and Inner Stickler. While I think the technique sometimes works, I also think it’s overused and often annoying. More times than not, beginning a novel with a prologue is a bad idea: it’s making me wade through me stuff that I won’t understand or care about until the stage is properly set, the characters properly introduced, and the story is underway.
“As Clarence stared out at the fiery radioactive mushroom plumes rising over the horizon spewing glowing dust on the gasping remains of civilization, he reflected upon how insignificant that morning’s breakfast had seemed. Maple or strawberry syrup on the waffles? It seemed like such an innocent choice…”
Johnny Got His Gun could only work with flashback, and it’s a great novel. I don’t find the technique any more gimmicky than bouncing around in time, though I’ve never really cared for epilogues.
Doorways In The Sand by Roger Zelazny is sort of a flashback novel. Each chapter starts with the protagonist in a bad situation, then he flashs back to how he got there, starting with how he got out of the bad situation in the chapter before. Really good book.
Back in 8[sup]th[/sup] grade, in Mrs. Owczarzak’s World History class, we did The Odyssey. It was there that we students were introduced to the concept of the Classical Epic in literature, which was commonly a recounting of “actions, travels, adventures, and heroic episodes … written in a high style” (this page). It goes on to note that often the story is started in the middle, with a later recounting of previous episodes.
I realized while composing this post that one contemporary example of this is Disney’s The Emperor’s New Groove which starts with Cuzco-as-Llama alone in the rain and mud, flashes back to the beginning, then catches up to the rain and mud and then proceeds to finish the story.
I regret that I was unable to present this post in dactylic hexameter verse, and also that there is no heroic content, except for the achievement of correctly spelling “Owczarzak”.
