Monday, April 2, 2012

Frankenstein - Mary Shelley - Foreshadowing

"It was a strong effort of the spirit of good; but it was ineffectual. Destiny was too potent, and her immutable laws had decreed my utter and terrible destruction." - Page 23
This quote is a very early sign of a very dark ending for a story which has yet to be told. From those circumstances, I like to call it foreshadowing. Whereas most foreshadowing tends to give more specific hints towards specific endings, this simply gives the end behavior. Unfortunately, as english students and not mathematicians studying chaos theory, we are not so interested in the end behavior as we are in the way to get there. So what Shelley does here is quite cunning to me. She pretends like she is revealing something very telling, when in fact it makes the reader desire even more to continue to read. She does give away that it doesn't end well, but the reader is left to wonder: What doesn't end well? and Why doesn't it end well? I find that these lines propelled me to read ahead moreso than any other in the book, hence why it has been given the honor of blog #100.

No comments:

Post a Comment