Flashback Examples in Short Stories: 6 Returns to the Past That Pay Off
Quick answer: Flashback examples from Bierce, Tolstoy, Chopin, Joyce, Chekhov and Tagore, showing how short stories step into the past and get back out without losing the reader.
A flashback is a scene or passage that leaves the story's present to show something that happened earlier, then returns. It differs from backstory told in summary because a flashback is dramatised: we are there, in scene, for a while. In a short story the cost is high. Every line spent in the past is a line the present must wait for, so the flashback has to change how we read what follows.
Six returns to the past
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce stops the execution at the end of part one and spends part two in the past, showing how Peyton Farquhar was tricked into the sabotage by a Federal scout in grey. The flashback supplies the reason for the rope and, more quietly, makes the third part's escape feel like justice owed.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy opens at the funeral, with colleagues calculating promotions, and then goes back to tell the whole life from childhood. The structure means we watch a man climb a career already knowing where the ladder ends. Almost the entire novella is flashback, and it never feels like one.
Desiree's Baby by Kate Chopin begins with Madame Valmonde driving to see the baby, and within a paragraph slides back to the day Desiree was found as a foundling asleep against a gatepost, then to Armand falling in love with her at that same gate. The two gate scenes, decades apart, frame everything that follows.
The Dead by James Joyce has Gretta, in the hotel, recall Michael Furey, the boy who stood in the rain under her window and died at seventeen. The memory is told in her voice, in scene, and it changes Gabriel's understanding of his marriage in the space of a page.
Misery by Anton Chekhov gives the cabman Iona one memory he needs to tell: his son's death in hospital that week. He tries it on three fares and is refused each time. The flashback never fully arrives in narration; it is finally spoken, in full, to his horse.
Kabuliwala by Rabindranath Tagore jumps eight years to Mini's wedding day, then reaches back through a piece of paper Rahmun carries: the inked handprint of his own small daughter in Kabul. One object opens the whole past and the narrator's understanding with it.
How to use it in your own story
A flashback earns its place by changing the present scene. If the story reads the same without it, it is backstory and should be cut or compressed to a sentence.
Common mistakes
The most common fault is the flashback that explains rather than reveals: a paragraph of history the plot did not need. Next is the pile-up of past perfect ('she had gone, he had said') which makes the scene feel embalmed; use it for a sentence, then slip into simple past. Third is the return that lands in the wrong place, so the reader has to reconstruct where the present scene had got to.
Where readers meet it today
Modern stories built on flashback include Tobias Wolff's Bullet in the Brain, Alice Munro's The Bear Came Over the Mountain, Edith Wharton's Roman Fever and Ambrose Bierce's heirs in crime fiction, notably Dashiell Hammett.
What writers can take from this
- Cut any flashback that does not change how the present scene ends.
- Enter through a physical trigger the reader can see.
- One line of past perfect, then simple past.
- Return to a present that has moved on, even by a gesture.
- If the flashback is longer than the present, consider making it the story.
Try it yourself
Write a 700-word story that takes place entirely during a two-minute phone call. Include one flashback of no more than 150 words, triggered by a sound on the line, and make the call end differently because of it.
Questions
What is an example of a flashback in a short story?
Part two of Ambrose Bierce's An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge leaves the hanging to show how Peyton Farquhar was tricked into sabotage days earlier, then returns to the rope for part three.
How do you write a flashback without confusing the reader?
Use a visible trigger, one clear time signal, and a return to a present that has changed. Keep past perfect tense to the first sentence or two, then write the memory in simple past as if it were a live scene.
Is a flashback the same as backstory?
No. Backstory is any past information; a flashback is backstory dramatised as a scene the reader lives through. A single line of summary is backstory, a page in the past with dialogue is a flashback.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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