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The Landlady Foreshadowing Essay

430 Words2 Pages

In the short story, The Landlady written by Roald Dahl, the author uses foreshadowing to reveal to the readers the gruesome fate of Billy Weaver. At the beginning of the short story, the author uses foreshadowing to acknowledge that something is off with the landlady. In order to clue the reader in on Billy’s fate, Roald Dahl makes the Landlady’s intentions of stuffing the main character very clear, by having “her blue eyes (travel) slowly all the way down the length of Billy’s body” (196-198). At this moment in the story, the landlady is already planning on stuffing Mr. Weaver, and even if the reader does not know this yet, it is still obvious that something is not right with her. Dahl uses her unusual behavior to give the reader an idea that she will be responsible for the main character’s untimely death. …show more content…

To make Billy’s fate more obvious to the reader, the author shows what is in store for Billy by partially revealing what happened to a past resident of the boarding house, Christopher Mulholland “who was on a walking tour through the West Country, and (then went missing)”(364-366). By hinting at what happened to a past resident of the boarding house, the author shows what will happen in the future to Mr. Weaver. We assume that Mr. Mulholland was killed by the Landlady and we have reason to suspect that she is planning to kill Mr. Weaver was well. This shows that there is nothing stopping her from killing Billy, as she has already killed men like him before. In the short story, the author also uses the Lady’s stuffed pets as a metaphor for Billy. In order to give the readers an idea of the main character’s fate, Dahl foreshadows Billy’s untimely end by using the landlady’s pets to represent Billy, specifically how “(the Landlady stuffs) all (her) little pets (herself) when they pass away”

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