: Writing about a future hapenning with a present time narrative What sort of a literary technique is it when writers narrating their story in the present time (in first person) talk of an incident

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I once ended a story with a flash-forward, where the character imagined what would happen in her future. I used that as the ending of the story.

This is not foreshadowing since it doesn't predict an event that happens later in the story.

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It's called foreshadowing and it's common in fiction. Sometimes the future events are just hinted at or suggested (for example, the gun described in the first chapter later becomes the murder weapon), other times they are explicitly spelled out (as in your example).

If the book has a first person narrator, you would usually only see explicit foreshadowing if it is written memoir style (with the implication that the person is narrating from a vantage point after all the events of the book has taken place).

If done well, it's an effective way to shape audience expectations. However, it can definitely be done badly. I once read a book that I found compelling largely because it was a cozy family drama, but the writer foreshadowed major tragedies on the first page. The addictive part of the book was wondering how things would go wrong. But the book ended without anything bad actually happening. It felt like a cheat.

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