SimonDoom
Kink Lord
- Joined
- Apr 9, 2015
- Posts
- 15,779
As a reader I feel a little cheated, especially with a first person narrative, if there's a big secret that gets revealed later in the story that my narrator knew from the beginning and didn't share. (Untrustworthy narrators aside...)
It might depend on tense, though. At the beginning of the story, if the story is told in present tense, the first person POV narrator might not know that something will become important until something triggers the flashback. There would be no reason, in that situation, for the narrator to reveal the flashback information to the reader.
In past tense it's trickier, presumably because when the starts it's been finished, and the narrator knows what is to come. I used third person limited past tense in my story, but I still wouldn't change it, because the alternative, which would be having two very short passages in the distance past to start the story, wouldn't have worked nearly as well.