What a flash-forward is

A term you'll meet in narrative technique.

A flash-forward is a scene that interrupts the present action to show an event from the future, then returns to the main timeline. It's the mirror image of the flashback: where a flashback jumps back, a flash-forward leaps ahead.

What it does

A flash-forward can create suspense, dread, or irony by revealing where things are heading. Showing a character's eventual fate, then circling back, makes us read the intervening events differently — every choice now shadowed by what we know is coming. It can also frame a story, opening at the end before doubling back to explain how we got there.

The technical term

In narrative theory, a flash-forward is prolepsis — a movement forward in narrative time, ahead of the main story. Its opposite, the flashback, is analepsis. Both are ways the order of telling departs from strict chronology.

Flash-forward vs. foreshadowing

Don't confuse them. A flash-forward actually shows a future scene, dramatised on the page. Foreshadowing only hints at what's to come through clues, mood, or suggestion, without leaving the present. One depicts the future; the other merely gestures toward it.

How to read it

When a narrative jumps ahead, ask what knowing the future does to your reading of the present. The flash-forward usually exists to load the ordinary scenes between now and then with irony or inevitability — meaning you'd miss if the story were told straight.

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