This Is Where It Ends By Marieke Nijkamp

When two people meet, they cannot truly understand each other until they’ve learned some of the other person’s memories. This concept can be demonstrated within the novel This is Where it Ends. In this book, there are a set of characters telling their perspective of a school shooting whilst also telling small stories, or flashbacks, about their past in the process. Flashbacks in this book, This is Where it Ends, by Marieke Nijkamp are important to the story because they enable a further understanding of the characters’ personalities, home lives, and how they have changed. The flashbacks written into the novel are important for many reasons. The reader learns about the characters’ personalities when looking at the flashbacks. The flashbacks can help the readers identify the characters and their personalities as round or flat. In this case, flashbacks shape round characters. To support this, one flashback in This is Where it Ends by Marieke Nijkamp states, “Matt didn’t care about the cold. He jumped, though his legs could barely carry him. He ran without fear of falling” (pg. 219). So, this passage shows how Matt is carefree and fearless. Before this part of the story, Matt’s personality was mainly inferred and was very superficial, …show more content…
To support this claim, one of the flashbacks explains, “I startled at the sound of the voice, and when I saw whom it belonged to, my blood ran cold. I hadn’t seen Tyler since junior prom, when he pinned me against a wall and told me I was corrupting Autumn” (pg. 51). Consequently, this flashback provides a scene and a reference to an even earlier scene that isn’t in the present timeline of the book. Because of this, the flashback is creating a “pre-exposition” to some extent, which technically would add to the plot. Once more, this still is not all of the information that the flashbacks can