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Foreshadowing
Explanation and Analysis—Last Call:
After Arthur’s final, fatal performance in King Lear, some of the audience gather in the theater lobby to drink and commiserate. During this scene, Mandel uses foreshadowing to hint at the impending collapse of the world:
In the lobby, the people gathered at the bar clinked their glasses together. “To Arthur,” they said. They drank for a few more minutes and then went their separate ways in the storm. Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city.
The passage explicitly signals the fate of the people who have lingered in the lobby. Here, the author is making it clear that their casual farewell to Arthur is also, unknowingly, a farewell to the lives that they knew. The mention of the bartender surviving “the longest” of “all of them” only to die three weeks later foreshadows the rapid spread of the Georgia Flu. It makes the idea of escape seem impossible, as if their deaths have already happened even as they stand there drinking. By specifying that the bartender’s brief survival is comparatively the longest, the passage informs the reader that the flu pandemic will very shortly claim an extraordinary number of lives. The phrase “the road out of the city” further reinforces this chillingly bleak future. By implying that there is only one “road” that leaves the city, Mandel is foreshadowing the narrowed, desolate world to come. This phrasing also suggests inevitability, as if there is no real hope of escape from the virus-laden city streets.
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