The story of the Phantom is told in one big flashback, as the story's prologue covers the events that led the narrator to believe that the Phantom was real, and subsequent chapters describe the story in great detail. Midway through the Prologue, the narrator switches between reflection and a flashback to past events:
The truth dawned upon me slowly. In my investigations I was constantly coming across events that appeared, at first, to be not of this world; and more than once I was very close to giving up, for I was exhausting myself vainly chasing an elusive image. At last, I found proof that my intuitions were not unfounded, and all my efforts were rewarded the day I finally ascertained that the Phantom of the Opera was more than a mere shadow.
That day, I had spent long hours poring over the light-hearted Memoirs of a Theatre Director, whose author, the all too sceptical Moncharmin, had understood nothing, during his term at the Opera, of the mysterious behaviour of the Phantom.
Here, the narrator alternates between reflections on "the truth" and a specific account of how he found the Persian and confirmed the Phantom's existence. Flashbacks function to ground the story in reality. Despite the Phantom's devious tricks and deeply mysterious nature, the narrator still strives to create a sense of reality by making each flashback explicitly clear and framing it in a believable way.
