Examples Of Foreshadowing In The Cask Of Amontillado

Authors put a lot of effort into their work, but do things like foreshadowing hint at what is coming next in the story? Foreshadowing is a widely known literary device used in all sorts of literature, adding little things that may hint a future outcome. The Cask of Amontillado, by Edgar Allen Poe, and Scarlet Ibis, by James Hurst, are two of the many short stories that have a lot of foreshadowing, but are presented in different ways. In both of these stories, most of the foreshadowing shows off death, so the authors used a more grim style. The reason why these two short stories were chosen, though, was because of how the writers applied the technique into the plot. Take The Cask of Amontillado, where the character is overcome with revenge and

Impossible! A mason?’ ‘A mason,’ I replied. ‘A sign,’ he said” (Poe 7). The readers would know in this text that “the sign” (or the foreshadowing) was the sign that Montersor’s dear friend, Fortunato, was going to be killed, but the character himself does not know that. Furthermore, other examples can be found when Montresor just had Fortunato come down into the vaults, where he got a deep cough. Our protagonist in the story then recommended they should head back up, but his friend pushed the idea away saying that he would not die from a cough. Stopping with the idea, Montresor agreed, foreshadowing that, yes, Fortunato will not die from a cough, but from something else very soon. On the other hand, short story The Scarlet Ibis has another way of showing foreshadowing—through nature. Instead of the character themself making the foreshadowing, the author presented it through weather and animals. An instance of foreshadowing that can be found is when the ibis died in front of the family, "Dead birds is bad luck," said Aunt Nicey, poking her head from the kitchen door. "Specially red dead birds” (Hurst