Foreshadowing examples from literature, and how to plant your own

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;

The sixth line of the play gives away the ending, with a pun: "take their life" means both are born and kill themselves. Every hopeful scene after it plays as a countdown.

That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me.

An older Pip narrates, so he can flag his first visit to Miss Havisham as a turning point without saying how. A narrator looking back is the natural home of direct foreshadowing, and memoirists use the same move.

THIRD WITCH. All hail, Macbeth! that shalt be king hereafter!
…
THIRD APPARITION. Macbeth shall never vanquish'd be, until
Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill
Shall come against him.

The first prophecy pushes Macbeth toward murder. The later ones sound like guarantees and turn out to be riddles: soldiers carry boughs from Birnam Wood, and Macduff, not "of woman born" in the usual way, kills him.

SOOTHSAYER. Beware the Ides of March.
…
CAESAR. The Ides of March are come.
SOOTHSAYER. Ay, Caesar; but not gone.

The warning is spoken twice, then backed by omens and by Calpurnia's dream of Caesar's statue running with blood. Each time Caesar waves it off, the dread grows, so the assassination lands as fulfillment rather than surprise.

DUNCAN. There's no art
To find the mind's construction in the face:
He was a gentleman on whom I built
An absolute trust.
[Enter Macbeth, Banquo, Ross and Angus.]

Duncan is speaking of the traitor whose title he has just given to Macbeth, and Macbeth walks in on the next line. The audience has already heard Macbeth's first thought of murder.

Go ask his name. If he be married,
My grave is like to be my wedding bed.

Juliet is being dramatic about a boy at a party. By Act 5 her wedding bed and her grave are the same tomb. The line works because it is natural in the moment.

"…it will not kill me. I shall not die of a cough."
"True—true," I replied…

Montresor, leading Fortunato to the niche where he will wall him up, agrees and means something else. He toasts Fortunato's "long life", and when asked for a sign that he is a mason, produces a trowel.

Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.

In the last paragraph the same fissure widens, the walls rush apart and the tarn closes over the ruins. The house and the family share a name, and a fate.

…the great horse-chestnut at the bottom of the orchard had been struck by lightning in the night, and half of it split away.

Rochester proposes under that tree, and the storm splits it the same night. Later Jane finds the halves still joined at the root, and at the end Rochester calls himself the lightning-struck chestnut. The weather foreshadows the separation, and the roots foreshadow the reunion.

LADY MACBETH. A little water clears us of this deed:
…
What, will these hands ne'er be clean?

After the murder Macbeth fears the oceans could not wash his hand clean. His wife says a little water will do. The play keeps returning to bloody hands until she sleepwalks, scrubbing at a spot no one else can see.

Now, there were two possessions of the James Dillingham Youngs in which they both took a mighty pride. One was Jim's gold watch that had been his father's and his grandfather's. The other was Della's hair.

Della sells her hair to buy a chain for the watch, and Jim sells the watch to buy combs for her hair. O. Henry names both objects side by side, disguised as comic exaggeration.

And he stirred it and he tasted it; not with a spoon that was brought to him, but with a file.

It is the file Pip stole for the convict on the marshes. The stranger leaves Pip two one-pound notes, which return in Chapter 39, when the convict reveals he is Pip's benefactor. The book's secret sits in a pub scene a child only half understands.

Treplev shoots a seagull and lays it at Nina's feet. Trigorin, a visiting writer, sketches a story from it: a girl by a lake, free as a gull, ruined by a man with nothing better to do. He then does that to Nina.

In Act 4 the gull returns, stuffed, a shot sounds offstage, and the play ends on the news that Treplev has shot himself. The man the principle is named for put a gun and a bird on stage, and paid off both.

It was a curious laugh; distinct, formal, mirthless. …
"Some of the servants, very likely," she answered: "perhaps Grace Poole."

The laugh is a true plant: it comes from Rochester's hidden wife. Grace Poole is the cover story, and it holds because it explains the clue instead of competing with it.

At that instant I was aware of a bushy black beard and a pair of piercing eyes turned upon us through the side window of the cab.

A bearded spy follows Sir Henry in London, and the butler at Baskerville Hall has a full black beard. Suspicion lands on him. The spy was Stapleton in a false one. The clue was real. Only the inference was wrong.

"It is well. I go; but remember, I shall be with you on your wedding-night."

Victor takes it as a threat to his own life and spends the wedding night armed, searching the inn, while the creature goes to Elizabeth. The hint is honest. The narrator's misreading is the misdirection.

Too loud. Mara watched her brother lace his skates by the reservoir. She had no idea the ice would nearly kill him before the winter was out.

Direct, on purpose. Years later, when people asked why she had stopped skating, Mara said she had grown out of it. It was the first lie she told about that winter.

Buried. Dad's rule was that nobody went on the reservoir until he had drilled a test hole, and Dad had been gone since October. Theo was already lacing his skates, insisting it was his turn to keep the puck, and Mara was arguing back, so neither of them mentioned the drill.