Retrospective Storytelling

Retrospective Storytelling is a way of telling a story where a character is looking back on past events. In the story of a Death of a Salesman, the main character, Willy is becoming delusional. To make this point evident in this novel, Arthur Miller makes the reader experience the flashbacks as Willy does. This gives us a subjective point of view in which we only understand what Willy is going through during these illusions. This method of storytelling is also used in a movie Memento. In this movie the Protagonist, Lenny is trying to solve the murder of his wife, but he can only remember events that have happened ten minutes before. To give the audience the same point of view as Lenny, he decided to tell the whole story backwards, which denies the audience the same information as Lenny. In Memento the way to distinguish which way the story is flowing is if it is in colour or not. All the black and white scenes are in the right order and the colour scenes are told backwards. In the black and white scenes Lenny is on the phone and is recounting the story of a man with a similar condition as himself. These two similar and unorthodox ways of telling a story is how these stories are unique. Their goals to force their audiences to adopt the same point of view as the main character is genius.

The main similarity that is present between these two stories is that there are many questions that are left unanswered because of the unorthodox way of storytelling. In Death of a Salesman the gap between the present and past is blurred because of Willy’s distortion of events. The biggest question throughout the whole narrative is why Biff turned out to be a failure. One of the flashbacks tells us this reason, which is because Biff caught Willy cheating causing him to give up on life. In Memento the large question is who killed Lenny’s wife, and throughout the story the audience is told that Lenny already avenged his wife’s death, but due to his condition he forgot. Due to non-linear story telling method that these narratives use these two obvious plot points are not accessible to the audience. This makes the story more intriguing for the audience which makes these two stories fun to read/watch.