Significance Of Flashback In A Painted House

3 LUKE CHANDLER’S COMING OF AGE IN GRISHAM’S NOVEL A PAINTED HOUSE

The novel depicts a few weeks of the life of the seven-year-old Luke Chandler in the American South and displays how various pleasant and unexpected events affect his mental and psychological development. A Painted House portrays Luke’s life surrounded by his family members and people who work in the cotton-picking field, physical and psychological violence, as well as secrets and deception that are induced by the events that happen in the area.

3.1 Definition of Coming-of-Age Fiction

A Painted House is classified as a “semibiographical coming-of-age novel” (Pringle 59) or a novel of the young adult genre which depicts a child character, the protagonist, who experiences various

All these terms refer to the way the story is told. Moreover, flashbacks are related to focalization as it refers to the way or the point of view from which the narrator tells the story. For this thesis, flashbacks are important because the whole novel is told through flashbacks, from the point of view of the narrator as a child.

One type of narrative that is practiced in literature is flashbacks, which is present in A Painted House. This term is used to “refer to the kind of rapid shift to a dramatized presentation of anterior events or memories” and flashbacks were initiated by the film industry (Rong 3). Another name for the flashback is analepsis, and, according to Fludernik (34), in such cases, “prior happenings are recounted, often as part of something the hero/heroine remembers”. On the other hand, some scholars distinguish flashback and analepsis as separate terms, for the former is primarily used in cinema, while the latter is common in literary works (Chatman 64). Flashbacks help authors to retell some past events that happened before the present time in the novel or short story. However, another definition of analepsis describes “any evocation after the fact of an event that took place earlier than the point in the story where we are at any given moment” (Genette 40). Analepses are often temporary, lasting for a short period of time and depicting a part of characters’ lives. In A Painted House, it is the opposite: the novel constitutes of the retelling of past events, from the perspective of the narrator. Thus, flashbacks are important because they can give some background information about characters and explain some actions or events, or, as in this case, be the main constituent of the