A term you'll meet in narrative theory.
Prolepsis and analepsis are the technical terms from narrative theory for what readers call flash-forward and flashback. The French theorist Gérard Genette codified them in his 1972 study Discours du récit ("Narrative Discourse"), part of his systematic anatomy of how stories handle time.
Analepsis (from the Greek analēpsis, "taking back") is a narrative detour into the past. The story interrupts its forward motion to recount an earlier event. Almost every novel uses analepsis somewhere — a character remembers a childhood scene, a chapter opens with the protagonist's backstory, a trial recounts the crime.
Homer opens the Iliad in the tenth year of the Trojan War and uses analepsis throughout to fill in what came before. The modernist novel turned analepsis into an organising principle — the whole of To the Lighthouse is structured around its interplay of present moment and remembered past.
Prolepsis (Greek prolēpsis, "anticipation") is the opposite move: the narrative jumps ahead of itself, showing the reader something that hasn't happened yet in the story's present.
García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude opens with one of the most famous prolepses in literature: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." We are told the colonel's fate in the first sentence; the novel takes four hundred pages to get there.
Genette's insight was that narrative order is one of the things a storyteller can choose. The same events can be told chronologically (a chronicle), with selective analepsis (a memoir), with structural prolepsis (a tragedy that opens at the funeral), or with both at once (a modernist novel where the present, the remembered past, and the foreshadowed future overlap on every page).
The terms matter because they give you a vocabulary for what a narrative is doing with time, beyond "well, it's not linear." Once you can name a prolepsis, you can ask: what does the writer gain by telling me this now rather than later?
When a narrative loops back ("Years before, she had…") or shoots forward ("Three decades later, the boy would remember…"), notice the move and ask what changes because of it. Prolepsis usually trades suspense for dramatic irony — you now know what's coming and the question becomes how. Analepsis usually trades clarity for depth — the present scene gets richer once you know what's behind it.
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