Post 3:Flashback (Ashley)

Flashback:A literary or cinematic device in which an earlier event is inserted into the normal chronological order of a narrative.

Passages:pg17-19: " "Lily you're starting school tomorrow so there are things you need to know. About your mother. For a moment everything got still and quiet, as if the wind had died and the birds had stopped flying. When he squatted down in front of me, I felt caught in a hot dark I could not break free of.
" It's time you knew what happened to her, and I want you to hear it from me. Not from people out there talking. We had never spoken of this, and I felt a shiver pass over me. The memory of that day would come back to me at odd moments. The stuck window. The smell of her. The clink of hangers. The suitcase. The way they'd fought and shouted. Most of all, the gun on the floor, the heaviness when I'd lifted it.I knew that the explosion I'd heard that day had killed her The sound still sneaked into my head once and a while and surprised me. Sometimes it seemed that when I held the gun there hadn't been any noise at all. that it had come later,... now,
T-ray scooped up a handful of dirt and let it fall out of his hands." The day she died she was cleaning out the closest," he said. I could not account the strange tone of his voice, an unnatural sound,how it was almost, but not quite,kind. Cleaning the closet.I had never considered what she was doing the last minutes of her life, Why she was in the closet, what they had fought about. " I remember" I said " You were yelling at each other." A tightening came to his face. "Is that right?" he said.His lips had started to turn pale,which was the thing i always watched for.I took a step backward. " Goddamn it, you were four years old!" he shouted " You don't know what to remember." In the silence that followed I considered lying to him saying I take it back I don't remember anything, but there was such a powerful need in me,pent up for so long, to speak about it, to say the words...

Explanation: This passage shows Flashback in the book. The protagonist, Lily is remembering back to when her dad was trying to tell her what happened with her mom, and how she died. He thought that she wouldn't remember what really happened, and he could lie to her. He got really mad when he found out she does remember. I think that the purpose of this passage was to show the relationship between Lily and her dad During an early time. It really shows how T-Ray looses his temper really quickly with Lily, even when she was little. It also shows the fear Lily has of him when he walks her way and when his lips turn white. I know this is the authors purpose because She really goes into depth about how scared she was and how outraged T-Ray was. I think this is important to the rest of the book because it shows T- Ray and Lily's relationship more further and might explain something further in the book.