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Examples Of Foreshadowing In The Fly Paper Elizabeth Taylor

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“The fly-paper”

“The Fly-paper” is a short story by Elizabeth Taylor, an English novelist. It starts as an everyday event and after a while demonstrates how oppressive the protagonist’s seemingly calm day changes to the darker side. In order to show not only a polite surface, but also an opposite,surface that includes tension and depressive motives, Elizabeth Taylor virtuously uses foreshadowing. Foreshadowing is being determined by a hint given in order to understand or predict certain events that will happen later in the story. It is a great method of using uneven objects / references to demonstrate the future events. I’ve found four examples of foreshadowing in the short story. Elizabeth Taylor is using this technique …show more content…

In the beginning of unfortunate events that will take place in the house of an old lady, a reader may observe a foreshadowing in the following sentence: “Sylvia followed the woman down a side path to the back door, trying to push her worries from her mind.”. An author is using a pre-scene surrounding, many readers, out of my own observation, did not notice. It is a really questionable moment, why she decided to go to the back door instead of using a main entrance. Another very interesting moment where Elizabeth Taylor wisely decided to use a foreshadowing is the end of the short story, when Sylvia noticed a fly-paper located in the house of an old lady: “She stared up at a fly-paper hanging in the window - the only disconcerting thing in the room. Some of the flies were still half alive, and striving hopelessly to free themselves. But they were caught forever.”. In my opinion, it is one of the smartest ways to end this story, which was completely shocking to a reader. Here, once again, a fly represented a young girl, Sylvia, and fly-paper represented a trap, house where she decided to go. But I believe that a fly- paper is not just a representation of a house itself, but also of the comfort that Sylvia tried to get from an old lady. And as she was experiencing a lack of love from her relatives, her kidnappers idea was to compensate that attention that a poor young

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