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Examples Of Foreshadowing In Lamb To The Slaughter

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“Lamb to the Slaughter” by Roald Dahl is an interesting story which contains many excellent uses of foreshadowing in it. This foreshadowing leads to many of the important events of the story. The story is about a wife Mary Maloney and her husband Patrick Maloney, who is a police officer. Patrick comes home one day and tells his wife some bad news, presumably divorce, Mary is especially shocked by this and begins to get dinner ready. She comes up from the cellar with a leg of lamb and strikes Patrick over the head with it, killing him. She then goes out and gets groceries and acts shocked when she gets home and finds that her husband is dead. Mary then calls the police, who then begin their investigation and search for the murder weapon. Eventually …show more content…

Patrick comes home quite tired and sits down and does “an unusual thing”. He lifted his glass [of whiskey] and drained it in one swallow” (Dahl, 1953). This is very powerful as it states that drinking like this is unusual. Most likely means that something bad has happened or is about to happen, and he needs to take the edge off. It later goes on to say that he does the same thing again with another glass of whiskey before he tells her the bad news. This lets readers infer that he has something on his mind. This piece of foreshadowing by Dahl is very effective at leading readers to believe that he has something on his mind, both in the word unusual and how it said earlier that he was unusually tired. Secondly, another piece of foreshadowing that Mary may hurt Patrick is when she goes to the cellar to get the meat. She finds the meat in the freezer and comes upstairs with it “holding the thin bone-end” (Dahl 1953). She does this while holding it with both hands, like one would hold a club. Initially, this act seemed benign, a simple gesture of preparing dinner. However, later as the story progresses, this seemingly innocent action takes on a darker

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