A: Alethea Black
S: “The Thing Itself”
B: I Knew You’d Be
Lovely, Broadway Paperbacks, 2011
T: foreshadowing
“Foreshadowing” is a somewhat mystical storytelling
device. It’s hard to distinguish from an
organic series of events. This mysticism
is implicit in the name: the shadow of things to come. So I don’t find it surprising that the driving
premise behind Black’s story, “The Thing Itself,” that plays so happily with
foreshadowing, is somewhat mystical: the main character can sense things
happening before they do. The tension in
the story arises when the main character senses something life-changing about
to happen. Both the main character and we
readers are on tenterhooks waiting for the axe to fall. Towards the end of the story, when everything
is going pretty well for the protagonist, he walks home drunk. I groaned while reading: he’ll be hit by a
car. Then I turned the page and read, “Then
it hit him” (84). But it was an idea, not
a car. On that walk home he gets hit by
a Pepsi bottle, people wave at him and yell at him (warning him?), he stares
obliviously around at the moon while things “whizz” by. In other words: everything points to him
getting hit by a car, that’s where the shadow falls. As readers we also expect this because so
many works follow a rule of hitting characters at their highest and saving them
at their lowest. Spoiler (seriously, if
you don’t want to know the ending, stop reading now): then Black surprises us
by defying expectations and letting the shadow fall elsewhere.
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