Yankee: Just a Travel Book

-So, I hope you finished Yankee for today’s class.
-I did, but I must admit I read the last 50 pages in diagonal… everybody ends up dead, right?
-You didn’t like it.
-Well… no. For a travel book it’s all right, I guess.
-What do you mean?
-I mean it’s a travel book: Hank goes through his imaginary Middle Ages. No character -development, no plot. Broken scenes with no unity whatsoever…
-You are being too hard on it.
-Maybe. I don’t like people who mock Lancelot either.
-So it’s kind of personal…

Muriel Spark, Queen of Prolepsis

For a long time I had the idea of writing a post titled “Flannery and the Flashbacks”, or something like that, as a token of my admiration for the way Flannery O’Connor uses –what is technically called analepsis– so naturally and smoothly. However, reading The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie I discovered  Muriel Spark has also a great time-management ability, but this time with flash-forwards which are more rare, probably because they are more difficult to use.
The most simple flash forward is to give some information about the future, for example the famous opening lines of Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez:

On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar woke up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on.