First Take: In a narrative, the act and effect of looking back in time, thus reviewing past events. In this first sense, it is meant to remind us that retrospection in narrative journalism typically emerges from the journalist-narrator, who is standing in the “textual present” of the narrative we are reading.

 Deeper: The act of looking back, while seemingly “natural” to most journalistic accounts, can also have profound interpretive effects.  

First, as readers we may reciprocally experience the mood or foreknowledge that the journalist now possesses and passes onto us. (For instance, perhaps a feeling of loss, or an awareness that a character is no longer living.) And thus by including the effect, retrospection is meant to identify, quite often, a second meaning: the overall result of reviewing the past, rather than simply the information we gather from a turn back in time, or in what we colloquially call a flashback. Furthermore, retrospection almost invariably includes the implied commentary or structural comparison the act of moving back in time or memory may create, as well, not just the “slice of time” itself. (For instance, perhaps we discover that a mother of an adopted child was adopted herself: we draw the inference.) Retrospection is thus related to, but also different from, the illusion of omniscience or objectivity in narrative journalism. Note: This term is reviewed in Chapter 3 as a “reality effect.”