ABSTRACT
When I reflect on narrative and its place in my reading and teaching, it is the dislocations to expected narrative pattern that have excited the children I have taught and myself as a teacher and reader. They have made me more aware of narrative and what it can do. Take the passage in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, for instance, in which Billy Pilgrim imagines the war running backwards, like a film running backwards before his eyes; or Pinter’s Betrayal, Kunert’s ‘Film Put in Backwards’ or Ian Seraillier’s backwards fairy-tale. Running narrative backwards makes you much more aware of how the sequence is constructed forwards, and what its constituent parts are.
