Irony and Foreshadowing In Short Stories The short stories, “Lamb To The Slaughter” and “Death by Scrabble” both use foreshadowing and irony to impact the reader’s interpretation of the ending of both stories. On multiple occasions, both authors used foreshadowing and irony to help readers interpret the ending of the stories. The main character of “Lamb To The Slaughter” was a caring and loving person who ends up doing something terrible, no one suspected her because the opposite of what was expected ended up happening. The irony and foreshadowing helped the reader interpret the ending because many hints were given through foreshadowing and irony. The authors gave descriptions of the characters at the beginning of the stories to point to …show more content…
At the beginning of “Death by Scrabble”, readers understood that the husband wanted to kill the wife, so the readers believed that in the end, the wife would die. It was a shock for some readers when the husband ended up dying, but when he was chewing on the Scrabble key, it hinted that something might happen to him. The husband dying is the opposite of what readers thought would happen. This is because, throughout the whole story, the husband vied for the wife to die. The irony is that instead of the wife dying, the husband dies, this is ironic because the wife is portrayed as a nice person, while the husband is evil, but in the end, the husband dies, and the wife watches, which contrasts to how her character was previously described. An example of the irony would be, “My wife plays DEATH for 34 points, just as the room starts to shake” (Fish 5). This quote proves that the irony was the husband dying instead of the wife due to his scrabble chip. When he does not stop chewing on his Scrabble chip, it leads readers to believe that something bad could happen to him, especially when his cousin died due to his throat swelling up. Foreshadowing and irony were two literary devices that were prevalent in “Death by Scrabble” and helped readers interpret the ending of the