Narrative techniques

Part of the assignment asks you to focus on the narrative techniques used by Jackie Kay in “Owl”.

By narrative techniques, we refer to those devices which contribute to constructing the plot and the narrative in ways that fit the author’s intentions and help frame the text’s themes and messages.

Flashback

In “Owl”, the main narrative technique used by the author is the flashback—taking the characters back in time to the beginning of a story or prior to the main narrated events. “Owl” begins with a flashback from the two main characters’ childhood: “It was when I was ten and Tawny was nine that we first came across the barn owl on the farmland where our parents went that summer on holiday.” (ll. 1-2); “We actually saw Tawny’s father kiss my mum one night when we’d crept out late to watch the night flights of our barn owl.” (ll. 22-23)

What is notable about the use of the flashback here is that readers are not told this is a flashback. We begin reading the story assuming that the plot concerns child characters. Only after the flashback ends, we find out that the plot concerns adult characters who remember an episode from their childhood: “ ‘If you’d known he was such a rat, would you have wasted these years?’ That was the question Tawn was asking me ...