Foreshadowing In The Landlady By Roald Dahl

In the realist fiction short story “The Landlady” by Roald Dahl, he tells the tale of a seventeen year old boy named Billy Weaver. Billy moves, to a new city and is looking for a place to stay during the war. He ends up in a boarding house owned by an odd little elderly lady on his way to the local hotel. In the story the author displays the lesson of not judging a person before really getting to know them because they can turn out to be physically and mentally dangerous or disappointing in the end, also Roald Dahl uses craft moves such as foreshadowing and irony throughout the story.

In the story Roald Dahl shows the theme/lesson of judging a person before really getting to know them because Billy is convinced that the lady who owns the

In the story, Dahl shows foreshadowing in the story because the details in the story hint at what is going to happen to Billy. The author writes, “I’ll give you a nice cup of tea. You really shouldn't bother...Milk? She said, and sugar?...Will you have another cup of tea? No, thank you, Billy said. The tea tasted faintly of bitter almonds, and he doesn’t much care for it”(480 and 340). The fragments from the text show what the old lady is going to do with Billy because she keeps offering him tea and she would not take no for an answer. Also when Billy finally takes the tea he does not like it. Billy says the tea tastes like almonds and that foreshadows what will happen to Billy because cyanide a poison is said to taste like almonds and the old lady keeps offering the tea that she put cyanide in because she is planning on killing him, and this shows he misjudged the old women because she is not as nice as she seemed. Another craft move that is demonstrated in the story is irony the author shows this in the story because the elderly lady is complimenting Billy and doesn't realize that she is not just saying it to be nice. I the passage it says, “...Tall and young and handsome, my dear, just exactly like you...Seventeen! she cried. Oh, it’s the perfect age. Mr. Mulholland was also seventeen...You have the most beautiful teeth”. These examples from the story show the irony of the old lady complementing Billy because the elderly lady likes the way he looks and thinks he would look nice as a stuffed figure like the other two guests who checked in a long time ago. She even says that one of the other boys were the same age as him and how it is a perfect age. This shows Billy does not judge her well and horrible things will happen to him because he is blinded by how nice the old lady