The
concept of time is one of the most
important elementsime in stories is a good arena for story research. One
of the leading theorists in story time is the French critic, Gerard Jent. In
his book narrative discourse, he offers a model to analyze story time.
The model examines time at three levels: order, duration, and frequency. In order,
investigation is made of flashbacks and flash forwards. Flashback refers to inserting an earlier event into the normal
chronological order of a narrative. This return to the past and
remembering a particular scene is goal directed and reveals a hidden side of
the story and sometimes helps the reader to decode the text. Foreshadowing
means predicting the story events. Predictions are often encouraging and are
effective in moving the story forward. This
paper intends to examine the issue of time in the story of Joseph the Prophet
in the holy Qur'an with an emphasis on the first level of the Gerard Jent's
model, namely, flashbacks. It also tries to determine the function of the
flashbacks in this Quranic story as the best story. The
results of this study indicate that flashbacks have brought about coherence and
continuity in the story. The intra-story
flashbacks are the most frequents ones. This frequency has had an influential
role in creating a cluster narrative in the sense that the story of Joseph the
Prophet revolves around a core which is his dream in childhood until it comes
true atwhen he becomes a king. The
fourth stage is the longest stage and is also filled with much tension. In this
scene, it is easy to detect flashbacks, which play an important role in
disentangling Joseph's story.