Characteristics and Functions of “Backwards” in Narrative

Inversion in narrative time is a kind of innovative techniques that involves the reversed direction of time from the end to the beginning. This kind of narrative has significant rhetoric and semantic functions. Most of researches in this field has mainly done around the novels in which the whole direction of the time is reversed. However some authors have used backward time in just a part of their fictions and they have benefited from most of its capacities and rhetorical and semantic functions. This essay, will firstly introduce “backward narrative” and secondly, will study two Persian short stories in which the authors have used backward technique in just a short part of narrative, to prove that – in comparison with full reversal narratives, limited usage of this technique does not reduce its rhetoric and semantic capacities, but also because the use of backward technique in narrative is mostly selective and precise, could present more useful capacities in both field of rhetoric and semantic.