The Ambitious Guest

“The Ambitious Guest” contains many instances of foreshadowing, a literary device that offers readers hints about a story’s events or outcomes.

In the second paragraph, the wind causes a “sound of wailing and lamentation” (299). Later in the story, the wind sounds “as if a funeral were passing” (305). In both instances, the sound of the wind refers to death and mourning, indicating that something terrible will happen to the family and the guest. The guest, the father, and the grandmother all mention their own deaths and how they would like to die. The repeated mention of death throughout the story foreshadows the deaths of the characters at the end of the story. Similarly, when the rocks are heard “rushing down the steep side of the mountain” (300), this action foreshadows how the family will die since they die in a landslide. Another moment of foreshadowing occurs when, having listened to the grandmother’s tale of an old superstition, the guest asks how “unknown and undistinguished” mariners at sea feel when they can feel the ship sinking into “that wide and nameless sepulchre” (306). Here, the guest may as well be talking about his own future because, like the mariners, he will be buried, unknown and undistinguished, beneath a landslide.