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Definition of Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing is a literary device in which authors hint at plot developments that don't actually occur until later in the story. Foreshadowing can be achieved directly or indirectly, by making... read full definition
Foreshadowing is a literary device in which authors hint at plot developments that don't actually occur until later in the story. Foreshadowing can be achieved... read full definition
Foreshadowing is a literary device in which authors hint at plot developments that don't actually occur until later in the... read full definition
Key Examples in One Hundred Years of Solitude
Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—The Firing Squad:
Throughout the novel, the narrator foreshadows a later incident in which Aureliano Buendía, having served as a rebel leader in a bloody civil war, faces a firing squad. This repetitive foreshadowing begins in the very first lines of the novel:
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.
Related Themes:
Chapter 3
Explanation and Analysis—Unto the Ages:
José Arcadio Buendía uses an idiomatic expression drawn from the Bible in conversation with Melquíades when the latter attempts to solve the prophecies of Nostradamus, which foreshadow later events in the novel:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Melquíades got deeper into his interpretations of Nostradamus. He would stay up until very late, suffocating in his faded velvet vest, scribbling with his tiny sparrow hands, whose rings had lost the glow of former times. One night he thought he had found a prediction of the future of Macondo. It was to be a luminous city with great glass houses where there was no trace remaining of the race of the Buendías. “It’s a mistake,” José Arcadio Buendía thundered. “They won’t be houses of glass but of ice, as I dreamed, and there will always be a Buendía, per omnia secula seculorum.”
Chapter 7
Explanation and Analysis—Prophecy:
With her ability to read the future in her cards, Pilar Ternera often foreshadows later events in the novel. However, her messages are often cryptic and do not lead to the expected results, leading to ironic twists of fate. In the midst of the civil war, for example, Aureliano asks her to predict the future, unreliably foreshadowing an attempt on his life:
Unlock with LitCharts A+[He] asked her to read the future in her cards. “Watch out for your mouth,” was all that Pilar Ternera brought out after spreading and picking up the cards three times. “I don’t know what it means, but the sign is very clear. Watch out for your mouth.” Two days later someone gave an orderly a mug of black coffee and the orderly passed it on to someone else and that one to someone else until, hand to hand, it reached Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s office [...] It had a dose of nux vomica strong enough to kill a horse.
