Foreshadowing, With Examples Checked Against the Texts

Foreshadowing is a hint, early in a story, at something that will happen later. It can be said outright, as when a prologue tells you how the play ends, or slipped in so quietly that the reader only sees it on the way back. The dictionary sense of the verb is "to show or indicate beforehand; prefigure", and Dictionary.com dates it to 1570 to 1580, from fore- and shadow.

The literary critic Gary Saul Morson put the image in one line in Narrative and Freedom (1994): foreshadowing "projects onto the present a shadow from the future." Every example below has been checked against the text itself, and the quotes are as the authors wrote them.

What Is Foreshadowing in a Story?

Foreshadowing is a promise the story makes about its own future. The reader is told, or shown, something now that only makes full sense later. When the later event arrives, it feels prepared rather than convenient.

Morson's point about how it works is the useful one for a writer. With foreshadowing, he writes, events "happen (or also happen) as a consequence of events to come." The writer knows the ending, and the hint exists because of it. That is why foreshadowing is planted in revision as often as in the first draft: you cannot hint at an ending you have not found yet.

What Are the Types of Foreshadowing?

The French narratologist Gérard Genette drew the most useful line in Narrative Discourse (1972; English translation by Jane E. Lewin, 1980). He separated the advance notice, which says what will happen, from the advance mention, which he called "simple markers without anticipation, even an allusive anticipation, which will acquire their significance only later on." At its place in the text, Genette writes, an advance mention is only an "insignificant seed", whose importance as a seed "will not be recognized until later".

Those two are the direct and indirect foreshadowing of most guides. The common forms fall under one or the other:

Genette names the false kind too. A writer can mislead the reader "by sometimes offering him false advance mentions, or snares", and the expert reader, expecting that, can then be fooled by snares that turn out to be real. Snares and true clues together are the raw material of a twist, and writing a plot twist that plays fair comes down to balancing the two.

What Are Some Examples of Foreshadowing?

Romeo and Juliet (direct). Before a word of the story, the Chorus gives away the ending: "A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life". The suspense is not what happens but how. Later, in act 3, scene 5, Juliet watches Romeo climb down from her window: "O God! I have an ill-divining soul! / Methinks I see thee, now thou art so low, / As one dead in the bottom of a tomb." The next time she sees him, he is dead in her tomb. (Some editions print "below" for "so low".)

Macbeth (prophecy). In act 1, scene 3, the third witch greets him: "All hail, Macbeth! that shalt be king hereafter!" In act 4 an apparition tells him that "none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth", and another that he will not be beaten until "Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill / Shall come against him." He reads both as safety. In act 5 the army cuts boughs from Birnam wood, and Macduff tells him he "was from his mother's womb / Untimely ripp'd." Every word came true. Macbeth misread it.

Of Mice and Men (indirect). John Steinbeck (1937) has Carlson tell Candy how to put down his old dog: "take him out and shoot him right in the back of the head". Afterwards Candy says, "I ought to of shot that dog myself, George. I shouldn't ought to of let no stranger shoot my dog." At the end of the book George looks "at the back of Lennie's head, at the place where the spine and skull were joined," and does it himself, before a stranger can.

Great Expectations (indirect, with a snare). In chapter 1, a convict on the marshes orders Pip, "You get me a file." Pip brings it, with food. Through the middle of the book Pip is sure his money comes from Miss Havisham: "She had adopted Estella, she had as good as adopted me" (chapter 29). Dickens lets him believe it. In chapter 39 the convict comes back: "Yes, Pip, dear boy, I've made a gentleman on you! It's me wot has done it!" The true hint was in chapter 1, and the false one was Pip's own.

A Farewell to Arms (symbol). Ernest Hemingway (1929) ties rain to death from the first chapter: "At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera." In chapter 19 Catherine says, "I'm afraid of the rain because sometimes I see me dead in it." She dies in childbirth, and the last line of the book is that he "walked back to the hotel in the rain." A symbol that warns like this is one use of symbolism in fiction, where an ordinary thing in the story carries a meaning beyond itself.

How Is Foreshadowing Different From Chekhov's Gun, a Flash-Forward or Dramatic Irony?

Genette's word for any jump ahead is prolepsis, "any narrative maneuver that consists of narrating or evoking in advance an event that will take place later." A flash-forward narrates the event. Foreshadowing only evokes it. The two overlap with Chekhov's gun often, because one planted detail can hint at an event and also be the thing that pays off in it. The same rule shows up in magic systems: Brandon Sanderson describes his First Law as being about foreshadowing, which is why Sanderson's laws of magic insist the reader learns a power before it solves a problem.

How Do You Write Foreshadowing?

1. Know the payoff first. Morson's point holds in practice: the hint exists because of the ending. Write the event, then go back and plant.
2. Decide how much the reader should know. Alfred Hitchcock, talking to François Truffaut (Hitchcock, 1967), compared a bomb nobody knew was under the table with one the audience had seen. The hidden bomb gives "fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion." Show it, and "the public is participating in the scene." Direct foreshadowing buys suspense. Indirect foreshadowing buys the click of recognition afterwards.
3. Hide the seed inside something else. An advance mention works when it looks like texture: a description of the room, a joke, a complaint about the weather.
4. Plant more than once. One mention is easy to miss. Hemingway's rain comes back again and again before it means anything.
5. Leave distance. A hint paid off in the next scene is not foreshadowing, it is a set-up for a gag.
6. Use a snare sparingly. A false hint has to be fair. When the truth comes out, the reader should be able to look back and see the real clue was there too, as in Great Expectations. An unreliable narrator is one way to do it, since the narrator can misread the hints in good faith.

A Worked Example

Elsie rings the bell in a fen village. The river is rising.

1. Direct. Her grandfather, mending nets: "This river took the old church once. It will want this one too."
2. Setting. Elsie notices the flood mark on the church wall is higher than last winter's.
3. Snare. The new sluice-keeper is seen at the gates after midnight. The village decides he is up to something.
4. Seed. The bell rope is frayed, and Elsie puts off replacing it.
5. Payoff. The bank breaks on the night of the bell festival. The sluice-keeper was checking the gates, and holds them long enough for Elsie to ring the warning, on a rope that just holds.

The grandfather's line tells the reader what kind of story this is. The flood mark keeps the threat in view. The snare gives the reader a wrong guess to enjoy. The rope pays off in the climax because it was shown in an ordinary moment.

How Do You Track Foreshadowing in Deckle?

Deckle is a novel-writing app, and its Outliner is a board of cards, one for every document in the book, each with a synopsis. Labels and filters turn it into a map of every hint and where it lands.

1. Open the Outliner on the Draft and add a card for each scene with Add › Scene.
2. In each synopsis, name the hint the scene carries: "Hint: the flood mark is higher than last winter's."
3. Make a label for each kind, such as "Hint", "Red herring" and "Payoff", each in its own colour (the pencil beside Status in the Inspector's Properties opens Edit labels & statuses).
4. Set the label on every scene that plants a hint or pays one off.
5. Switch the Outliner to its list and read down. Every hint should have a payoff below it, and the payoff should come late enough to surprise.
6. To follow one hint through the book, open Filters on the Outliner and type a word from it, such as "river", into Search. Only the cards whose title or synopsis mention it stay on the board.

The Outliner is also where you move a payoff that lands too soon. When a payoff has no hint at all, that is one of the classic ways to find a plot hole, and the fix is a seed planted earlier.

Common Mistakes

• Making the hint too loud. If the narration lingers on the frayed rope, the reader solves the climax in chapter one. Put it inside a description of something else.
• Hinting at nothing. A dark omen that never pays off reads as a broken promise. Cut it or pay it.
• Paying off too soon. Leave scenes between the hint and the event.
• Unfair snares. A red herring must have an innocent explanation the reader can accept once it comes, and the true clue must also have been on the page.
• Planting before the ending exists. Hints written blind usually point at the wrong thing. Plant in revision, once you know what you are pointing at.

What Do Foreshadowing Guides Get Wrong?

• "The leaves fell early that year" quoted as a sentence. In A Farewell to Arms it is a clause in the middle of a long sentence about troops on the road. The clearer hint in chapter 1 is the rain that brings the cholera, which is the image Catherine returns to in chapter 19.
• Chekhov's gun treated as a kind of foreshadowing. Chekhov's 1889 letter was about cutting a speech that made promises the play would not keep. It is a rule about payoff, not about hinting.
• Macbeth's prophecies called simple direct foreshadowing. They are true, and misleading. Macbeth hears safety in "none of woman born". The foreshadowing works because he, and a first-time audience, misread it.
• Red herrings treated as failed foreshadowing. They are a deliberate form of it. Genette calls them "snares".

Sources

Retrieved 26 October 2026.

• Dictionary.com, "foreshadow", definition and "First recorded in 1570–80".
• Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, translated by Jane E. Lewin (Cornell University Press, 1980), the chapter "Order", on prolepsis, advance notices, advance mentions and snares (archive.org).
• Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (Yale University Press, 1994), on foreshadowing and sideshadowing (archive.org).
• François Truffaut, Hitchcock (Simon and Schuster, 1967), on suspense and surprise (archive.org).
• William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Project Gutenberg eBook 1513, Prologue and act 3, scene 5.
• William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Project Gutenberg eBook 1533, act 1, scene 3; act 4, scene 1; act 5, scenes 4 and 8.
• John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (P. F. Collier, 1937), chapters 3 and 6 (archive.org).
• Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, Project Gutenberg eBook 1400, chapters 1, 29 and 39.
• Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, Project Gutenberg eBook 75201, chapters 1 and 19 and the last line.