Narrative Writing and Heartfelt Flashbacks
While reading “A Silent Night That Brought Healing” by Steve Banko, “Admittance To a Better Life” by Michael Oatman, and “The Sanctuary of School” by Lynda Barry, flashbacks can be found in each narrative essay. In a narrative essay, flashbacks serve as interruptions of events from the past and add context or background information to present events that writers provide. Flashbacks in narrative writing help readers to visualize and empathize what the author felt during a specific time. In the narrative essay“A ‘Silent Night; That Brought Healing,” Steve Banko starts off to talk about how the magic of Christmas began for him, but the real magic did not arise until ten years later into his life. Before beginning to explain in detail where he was and what was happening he says to his audience, “On Christmas Eve 1968, I was a patient in a military hospital in Yokota, Japan,” (Banko, par. 3). That sentence is a flashback; which that point in time of his life was most significant and changed his life in someway. This sentence is a flashback because he wants to explain when Christmas music really began to feel magical for him. During this flashback, different parts of Steve Banko’s body were shattered and burned from dodging bullets of machine guns for hours in the Vietnam War. He then mentions the amount of surgeons who had a hard time to repair his leg. He expressed the luck he desperately needed to find before the sound of Christmas