Rebecca: Flashbacks 2 key examples

This room has been shut up, but the young narrator can't resist going in after she sees Mrs. Danvers and Jack Favell conferring in the window. The two schemers have closed the shutter again when the narrator first arrives on the scene, leaving only artificial light in the room. The narrator compares the artificially-lit bedroom to a stage where fictional events play out, over and over again, every time the curtain rises. But when she opens the shutter again, she loses the sense that she is an audience member waiting to watch actors put on a play. Instead, now that she has opened the shutter as though to use the room for herself, everything is "vivid and alive" around her. If the room was an empty stage before, she has stepped onto that stage and brought the action to life. Everything in this room was waiting for her, the new Mrs. de Winter, to open the shutter and set things in motion.

Soon, the narrator finds herself not in her own story, but rather in the midst of a flashback in which Rebecca's last night alive plays out on the "stage." The flashback, narrated by Mrs. Danvers, comes on slowly. It starts as mere reminiscence and builds in intensity until Mrs. Danvers, and not the narrator, seems to be in control of the narration. Mrs. Danvers shows the narrator the unwashed clothing Rebecca was wearing that fateful night. She shows her the brushes she used to use on Rebecca's hair. She asks the narrator to hold these objects, to smell them, and to feel them as no one but Mrs. Danvers or Rebecca ever has. Mrs. Danvers takes over speaking for long, immersive stretches, using these objects as props. Whenever Mrs. Danvers pauses, the narrator reports feeling under the maid's physical and narrative control: Mrs. Danvers bruises the narrator's arm with her grip, and the narrator feels a strong impulse to "get away from her, away from the room."

The narrator wants to come to her senses and disentangle herself from Rebecca's past by stepping off the "stage" where that past is doomed to play out over and over again in people's memory. The way she yields narrative control to the flashback reinforces that the story of her life at Manderley never belonged entirely to her. From the moment she married Maxim and became "Mrs. de Winter," she was living Rebecca's life as well as her own. Her presence at Manderley makes Rebecca "vivid and alive" again so that, over and over, people must remember Rebecca's death like the tragic ending of a play that is performed night after night.

Maxim has just reacted somewhat angrily to the coroner's line of questioning. The narrator does not respond aloud. Nor does she tell the reader what she was thinking. Instead, she reproduces her thoughts directly on the page, without the use of any internal dialogue tags such as "I thought." The effect is that it almost seems like the narrator who has been telling the story the whole time has been overcome with the memory and is experiencing it all over again, live. She is actively worried that Maxim sounds too angry and that he will lose his temper. She is actively pleading with Maxim and with God for a good outcome. It is as though she does not already know how the scene plays out.

The narrator's stream of consciousness here heightens the suspense for the reader, who is invited to sit with the narrator on the edge of their seat. Additionally, the way the narrator gets lost in the sensations of her own story is a reminder that for her, these memories are extremely vivid. She flashes back to them with her entire body, not just her mind. Even long after Manderley has burned down, the narrator remains in its thrall because what happened there was so strange and life-altering. Moments like this one in the novel make it clear why Alfred Hitchcock, known for genre-defining suspense films, was compelled to adapt Rebecca.