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Flashback
Explanation and Analysis—Dennis's Accident:
In Chapter 9, Diddy Shovel, the harbormaster of Killick-Claw, explains Dennis Buggit's near-death experience in a flashback. This flashback is meant to justify Jack Buggit's anxiety about his children going to sea:
Dennis, now, he is a fine carpenter. Better carpenter than fisherman. And that was a relief to Jack—with all that's happened to the Buggits on the sea. Jack has a morbid fear of it for all he spends as much time as he can on the water. He didn't want his boys to be fishermen. So of course both of them was crazy for it.
Diddy is an effective storyteller, and he gives the flashback a sense of suspense and foreboding. However, Diddy is then interrupted and the flashback quickly fades:
"When he see she was still afloat the captain turned back and reboarded her, and the next day they got a salvage tug out that fastened a tow and finally brought her in."
"And Dennis?"
But the telephone rang and the old man creaked away into his chart room, his voice booming over another wire. Came to the doorway.
"Well, I must cut it short."
By cutting the flashback off abruptly, Proulx reveals how engaging that literary device can be, absorbing the reader and transporting them into a different time and place. Like Quoyle, the reader wants to know how the story ends (what happens to Dennis?). However, readers are left in suspense for the time being as the present interrupts the telling of the past.
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