Foreshadowing Analysis

Everything that happens is dark and evil. No one wants to think. The people are oblivious that they are living in a dystopia What could I possibly be referring to? The book Fahrenheit 451. Many times in this book you get the impression that maybe something bad is going to happen or the turning point is arriving. It draws you in, wanting you to find out what happens next. Through foreshadowing Ray Bradbury has many on the edges of their seats thinking what will happen.

 Foreshadowing was a big part of this book when it came to the suspense. Towards the beginning of the book, Ray Bradbury  set the book up around a particular scene: "He stood looking up at the ventilator grille in the hall and suddenly remembered that something lay behind the grille, something that peered down at him now. He moved his eyes quickly away" (10). Knowing that this book was about burning books, I instantly started thinking, does the fireman really have books? When it says he quickly looks away, that indicates that he was probably hiding something bad or unknown. With all of these thoughts in my head I knew it would play a big role in the book.

There was another example of foreshadowing but this one really means something big. On page 110 Guy says, "Why we've stopped in front of my house." This is probably the biggest line of the book. In this scene the firemen were called to  burn books and they stopped in front of Guy's house. Now they have to burn his house and arrest him for keeping books. The consequences alone make me think that this has to be the big turning point, where all of the action will start.Guy now has to make the choice of run or spend his days in jail.

The final form of foreshadowing is very subtle but it makes a huge impact on what happens at the end. After Montag had his little "incident" at his house he is forced to get out of the city or he gets killed by the infamous Mechanical Hound. He successfully makes it out but now he needs to find the group that lives on the train tracks in order to survive the wilderness. After Montag had been floating in a river forever, he finally finds what he needs on page 145 "The railroad tracks" Those three words alone mean that he is free, free from the dystopian world he lived in, free from the clueless lives of others, and best of all free to express and let out his emotions and thoughts that he had to keep in due to the city and its people.

The book Fahrenheit 451 always had you thinking about what will happen next.  Foreshadowing was what had you hooked, what had you want to keep reading to find out what happened. Ray Bradbury mixed the foreshadowing in with the most suspenseful parts which got me thinking about what would happen, what would go wrong, and what would go right. That's why this was such a surprising and great book.