Don't know how to phrase this exactly, but there's something so thrilling about reading fiction where the narrator is recounting a story from the past at length and then suddenly interrupts the flow of the narrative to interject with information from the presentfuture that is unavailable/unknowable to them in the pastpresent of the story they're telling you.
For example, Winter Love by Han Suyin is about a young woman's affair with her married classmate Mara. There's a boy in her boarding house who is a creep and a pest, and, midway through describing his latest incursion, she reveals that she marries him, and it feels like you've been punched in the gut!
I ran up to my room, slammed the door; locked it though I knew Andy wouldn’t come. I wasn’t really frightened of him. A silly medical student boasting of his affairs with French girls. I’d let him, a couple times, out of curiosity and because he said, ‘Aw, be a good sport,’ and swore he’d be careful, and I wanted to be a good sport and broad-minded, not silly and old-fashioned. Also I wanted to know what it was like. I mean, one does want to find out what it’s all about. But I hadn’t felt anything, not one way or the other.
It’s so strange to think back to Andy then, when he’s so respectable now, a different person, getting fat, and fussy about his clothes. He’s my husband and I’m used to him. We don’t talk about the past. Why should we? Andy has never guessed about Mara.
or in The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe, you get lots of these as our narrator Severian slowly reveals the heights to which he's ascended and the long journey he's undergone from where he started:
Then he and Master Palaemon expounded to me that secret which lies at the heart of the guild and is the more sacred because no liturgy celebrates it, and it lies naked in the lap of the Pancreator.
And they swore me never to reveal it save - as they did - to one about to enter upon the mysteries of the guild. I have since broken that oath, as I have many others.
It feels like the narrator is reaching out through the pages to grab you and shake you, I don't know, it's just so utterly effective to me!
areudirty
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romaincrisis
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