Foreshadowing Futures That Never Happen by Orlando Bartro
The Oxford English Dictionary defines foreshadow as “to serve as the shadow thrown before; hence to represent imperfectly beforehand.”
A story that foreshadows its events causes the reader to want to know what happens next, to desire an imperfectly prefigured future to become real.
How will it happen? How will the murderer be caught, the lovers be united, the planet be found?
But a skillful story also foreshadows events that could happen, but don’t: those imperfectly expected futures that we seek to avoid or to enjoy. I call the foreshadowing of events that don’t happen “false foreshadowing.”
One of the best examples of false foreshadowing occurs in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure—a novel whose theme is how people convince themselves that they are motivated to do good for good reasons, needing to believe that they believe in their ideals in order to act as they do when the deepest truth about themselves is selfishness.
In Jude the Obscure, Arabella finds her child a bother; so, she gives him to Jude, the putative father, to “raise until he gets old enough to be of use.” Then Jude and his companion, Sue, raise the boy for years.
Then one day, Arabella is widowed, and she wants her child back. The boy is older now and can be useful to her.
Arabella meets Jude and Sue at a fair—and Sue understands that Arabella wants to take her child back.
Thus, a conflict between Arabella and Sue is foreshadowed—extensively foreshadowed even in the long-term structure of the novel!—but the conflict doesn’t happen. Something else happens, a horrible event whose impact has been greatly increased by the foreshadowed future that has been lost.
* Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew, usually available at Amazon for $4.91.