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Locate an example of a flashback in the story "Rules of the Game" and describe it. Include the definition of flashback in your answer, and support your response with evidence from the text.

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Answer and Explanation:

"Rules of the Game" is a short story by author Amy Tan. The main character is an eight-year-old named Waverly Jong, the American daughter of Chinese immigrants.

The very first lines in the story are an example of flashback. Flashback is a technique that interrupts the chronological order of events of a story to go back to an earlier time. The narrator in "Rules of the Game" is Waverly herself. Her focus is on her eight-year-old self and what happened when she learned to play chess. However, she uses flashback at the beginning of the story to transition to a time, when she was only six-years-old, when her mother taught her a valuable lesson. We only notice this is a flashback a few lines later:

"I was six when my mother taught me the art of invisible strength. It was a strategy for winning arguments, respect from others, and eventually, though neither of us knew it at the time, chess games."

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