The Use Of Foreshadowing In The Wishing Pool By Tananarive Due

In “The Wishing Pool” by Tananarive Due, she uses foreshadowing to caution readers that the “wishing pool” is not a gift, but a curse. Her mundane language in detailing the wishing pool and each retelling of the wishes made and their consequences becoming more and more traumatizing. When detailing the appearance of the wishing pool, Due does not use words such as beautiful, magical, or ethereal. “It was more like a puddle than a pool, Joy had always thought, maybe six feet across, so shallow that the green-brown water only reached their knees” (Due 2). When we imagine places or see places in film that grant wishes, the scene is full of lush greenery, beautiful crystalline water, or elegant architecture, which is supposed to draw the onlooker

The first wish that ended poorly was the wish Natalie and Joy first made together, and they wished for a dog. Their wish was granted quickly. The next morning Natalie came to Joy's cabin and showed her “a black and white dog, coat a bit muddied (as if, just maybe, it had crawled out of the Wishing Pool), [which] was running in circles around Natalie” (Due 3). The two were elated. They had named their new found friend “Lucky” due to him coming from the wishing pool and even managed to convince each of their parents to a joint custody deal. The custody plan failed when on the day that Joy was supposed to leave the cabin “Natalie knocked on the cabin door teary-eyed and said Lucky had crawled out of her house and wouldn’t come when she called” (Due 3). Joy did not take this turn of events as a sign of the wishing pools' mischievous ways, but that their wish was not specific enough. She came to the conclusion that she and Natalie should’ve included that they wanted to keep this dog in their wish list. By the time Joy had returned to the cabin six months later, Natalie had

When the two of them arrived at the wishing pool, Natalie dropped her coin into the puddle and said “Please let my parents split up” (Due 3). And just like that, her wish had been “granted.” The next summer, Joy ventured to Natalie’s cabin and was greeted by a complete stranger. This stranger informed Joy that the house was sold after the owner was killed in a drunk driving accident. She asked the new tenant if it was Natalie who had been hit and the neighbor responded with “no, honey, the little girl and her mom are fine. They lost the daddy, though” (Due 3). This story specifically relates to the saying “be careful what you wish for.” Natalie wished that her parents were no longer together and she got that, but at the cost of her life being altered forever. The final wish that Joy participated in was as an adult she revisited the cabin to see her sick father. She was heartbroken seeing the conditions he was living in. Not just physically, but mentally as well. He was torturing himself, living in absolute squalor, and punishing himself for starting to forget his wife, due to dementia. She could not stand to see him live like this, so she took a trip to the wishing