If you’ve ever read a novel that kept you wanting to find out what’s going to happen
next, or watched a movie that drops ominous hints about the fate of one or more of its
characters, then you’ve probably already experienced foreshadowing.
“Foreshadowing” is a narrative device in which suggestions or warnings about events
to come are dropped or planted.
Sometimes, foreshadowing is relatively obvious; other times, it can be more obscure or esoteric,
especially when certain elements can only be recognized as foreshadowing after the fact,
when readers have more information with which to contextualize and make sense of what happened
earlier. So foreshadowing takes advantage of the difference
between two additional literary terms that, in conversation, are often used synonymously,
but actually mean quite different things: plot – which is the order of events in a
narrative as they would take place linearly – and narrative, which is how those events
are told or related. When a piece of foreshadowing shows up early
in the narrative, then, it hints at or gestures toward something that is going to take place
later in the plot: usually not by giving away precisely what’s going to happen, but by
dropping a hint or make an allusion to something that’s going to occur down the road, so
to speak. We’re being told about it now in the narrative,
then, to heighten our anticipation and make us want to find out what’s going to happen.
Foreshadowing can serve multiple purposes: The most common purpose is to generate or
increase narrative suspense or tension. This is why foreshadowing is often found at the
end of chapters or sections, and why it’s a standard feature in genres that really rely
on suspense, like the Gothic novel and the horror movie.
A classic example of this kind of foreshadowing can be found in Mary Shelley’s famous Gothic
– and early science fiction – novel, Frankenstein, from 1818.
When Victor Frankenstein is telling us about his childhood, for example, he is narrating
from the vantage point of many years later – and so he knows more than we as readers
do about what’s going to happen in the future. At one point, for example, Victor relates
how, during a family vacation when he was 13 years old, a rainy day forced them to stay
indoors, and Victor found some old books of occult philosophy by the medieval mystic Cornelius
Agrippa.
After beginning to read them eagerly, he asks his father about them, but gets only an offhand
dismissal.
Victor then tells us:
“If, instead of this remark, my father had taken the pains to explain to me, that the
principles of Agrippa had been entirely exploded, and that a modern system of science had been
introduced . . . I should certainly have thrown Agrippa aside.
. . . It is even possible, that the train of my ideas would never have received the
fatal impulse that led to my ruin.
But the cursory glance that my father had taken of my volume by no means assured me
that he was acquainted with its contents; and I continued to read with the greatest
pleasure.”
Here we have a very explicit bit of foreshadowing, something that clearly tells the reader to
expect bad things to happen as a result of Victor’s early exposure to mystical treatises
that don’t respect the boundaries and limitations of modern science (just as Victor will go
on to transgress the boundaries of the possible by learning to reanimate dead matter).
But as I already mentioned, sometimes foreshadowing isn’t this obvious – sometimes it’s
not something the narrator says, for example, but something that happens whose significance
only becomes clear later. And there’s a good example of this just
a few pages later in Shelley’s novel, when Victor – still narrating his childhood remembrances
– recalls a memory of watching “a most violent and terrible thunder-storm..
As I stood at the door, on a sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful
oak, which stood about twenty yards from our house; as so soon as the dazzling light vanished,
the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump.
. . . The catastrophe of this tree excited my extreme astonishment, and I eagerly inquired
of my father the nature and origin of thunder and lightning.
He replied, ‘Electricity’ . . .” Shelley’s original readers would likely
not have known what to make of this scene, besides recognizing the sublimity of nature’s
power: but several chapters later in the novel, when Victor finally undertakes his terrible
act of creation, it is strongly hinted that the power behind it is the same power that
devastated the oak of his childhood: electricity. When Victor describes his plan to “infuse
a speak of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet," then, readers can think back
to that original lightning strike and recognize its clever foreshadowing in a way that only
comes into focus later, in what Victor calls “my workshop of filthy creation.”
As with much foreshadowing, then, this is Mary Shelley’s way of telling readers, essentially,
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you!”
Of course, foreshadowing is also frequently used in realist narratives too: any time a
first-person narrator says something like “Little did I know that my decision to skip
my morning coffee would come back to haunt me by mid-afternoon,” we’re in the realm
of foreshadowing: even if all that’s being foreshadowed here is the fact that the narrator
will fall asleep in an afternoon department meeting.
Note: this example is totally not based on personal experience!