Definition of Foreshadowing
Key Examples in White Noise
In Chapter 2, Jack continues to describe his family's home. It is full of stuff—consumer goods of all types with seemingly no purpose, tucked away into countless boxes. These boxes will stay in their house throughout the novel and their reactions to them will change over time. Here, in the first reference to them, Jack uses imagery to compare the objects' physical weight to their emotional weight:
[...] we regard the rest of the house as storage space for furniture, toys, all the unused objects of earlier marriages and different sets of children, the gifts of lost in-laws, the hand-me-downs and rummages. Things, boxes. Why do these possessions carry such sorrowful weight? There is a darkness attached to them, a foreboding. They make me wary not of personal failure and defeat but of something more general, something large in scope and content.
In Chapter 2, Jack continues to describe his family's home. It is full of stuff—consumer goods of all types with seemingly no purpose, tucked away into countless boxes. These boxes will stay in their house throughout the novel and their reactions to them will change over time. Here, in the first reference to them, Jack uses imagery to compare the objects' physical weight to their emotional weight:
Unlock with LitCharts A+[...] we regard the rest of the house as storage space for furniture, toys, all the unused objects of earlier marriages and different sets of children, the gifts of lost in-laws, the hand-me-downs and rummages. Things, boxes. Why do these possessions carry such sorrowful weight? There is a darkness attached to them, a foreboding. They make me wary not of personal failure and defeat but of something more general, something large in scope and content.