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Definition of Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing is a literary device in which authors hint at plot developments that don't actually occur until later in the story. Foreshadowing can be achieved directly or indirectly, by making... read full definition
Foreshadowing is a literary device in which authors hint at plot developments that don't actually occur until later in the story. Foreshadowing can be achieved... read full definition
Foreshadowing is a literary device in which authors hint at plot developments that don't actually occur until later in the... read full definition
Chapter 3
Explanation and Analysis—Cassandra :
In a passage that introduces the character of Clytie, short for Clytemnestra, Faulkner alludes to figures from Greek mythology and foreshadows the death of Thomas Sutpen:
He named Clytie as he named them all, the one before Clytie and Henry and Judith even, with that same robust and sardonic temerity, naming with his own mouth his own ironic fecundity of dragon’s teeth which with the two exceptions were girls. Only I have always liked to believe that he intended to name her Cassandra, prompted by some pure dramatic economy not only to beget but to designate the presiding augur of his own disaster, and that he just got the name wrong through a mistake natural in a man who must have almost taught himself to read)——–
As Mr. Compson describes past events to his son, Quentin, he notes that Sutpen typically named or renamed the enslaved individuals working on Sutpen's Hundred, his estate. After having a daughter with an enslaved woman on his estate, he names the daughter "Clytie," short for "Clytemnestra," the wife of Mycenaean king Agamemnon in Greek Mythology. Mr. Compson, however, conjectures that this was an error by Sutpen, and that he actually intended to name her after a different figure in Greek mythology: Cassandra, a Trojan priestess who had the ability to foresee the future but who was also cursed not to be believed. This allusion to Cassandra builds on the novel's focus on destiny and fate. Mr. Compson describes Clytie as "the presiding augur" of Sutpen's "own disaster," foreshadowing Sutpen's later death at the hands of a poor squatter on his estate.
