Reverse chronology

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Reverse chronology is a narrative structure and method of storytelling whereby the plot is revealed in reverse order.

In a story employing this technique, the first scene shown is actually the conclusion to the plot. Once that scene ends, the penultimate scene is shown, and so on, so that the final scene the viewer sees is the first chronologically.

Many stories employ flashback, showing prior events, but whereas the scene order of most conventional films is A-B-C-etc., a film in reverse chronology goes Z-Y-X-etc.

Purpose

A narrative that employs reverse chronology presents effects before causes, asking the audience to piece together information about character motivations and the plot and encouraging them to ask themselves questions like "is this why she acted this way?" Scenes set in the past are interpreted in light of information the viewer has already learned from scenes set in the future, giving the audience a degree of narrative agency.[1]

Examples of use

Literature

The epic poem Aeneid, written by Virgil in the 1st century BC, uses reverse chronology within scenes.[2] Polish novelist Boleslaw Prus uses this technique in a short episode of The Doll (1890) when the entire life of one of the protagonists, Ignacy Rzecki, is rolling back in the front of his eyes, from the current moment back to his childhood, while he is dying. The action of W. R. Burnett's novel, Goodbye to the Past (1934), moves continually from 1929 to 1873.[3] The Long View (1956) by Elizabeth Jane Howard describes a marriage in reverse chronology from 1950s London back to its beginning in 1926.[4] Edward Lewis Wallant uses flashbacks in reverse chronology in The Human Season (1960).[5] The novel Christopher Homm (1965), by C. H. Sisson, is also told in reverse chronology.[6]

Philip K. Dick, in his 1967 novel Counter-Clock World, describes a future in which time has started to move in reverse, resulting in the dead reviving in their own graves ("old-birth"), living their lives in reverse, eventually ending in returning to the womb, and splitting into an egg and a sperm during copulation between a recipient woman and a man. The novel was expanded from Dick's short story "Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday", first published in the August 1966 edition of Amazing Stories.

Iain Banks's novel Use of Weapons (1990) interweaves two parallel stories, one told in standard chronology and one in reverse, both concluding at a critical moment in the main character's life.