Foreshadowing-Time and Time Again

"It's the one Tommy and I found in Norfolk years afterwards-but that's another story I'll come to later." (Page 64)

       To be frank, Ishiguro's foreshadowing runs rampant throughout the story, but I decided to pinpoint one particular instance in order to get a firm grasp on its purpose. This sentence appears before Kathy describes her Songs After Dark tape by Judy Bridgewater. What can be assumed from this sentence is that Tommy and Kathy will travel to Norfolk at some point together. That's obvious. However, if this particular sentence were isolated from the rest of the story and the reader had no previous knowledge about Kathy and Tommy's continuing relationship into their adulthood, one could infer that they remain friends because they go to Norfolk together later in life. Fortunately, when reading a book, we are not allowed only a sentence to understand the relationships between characters. We are provided with an intricate web of details and little stories to aid us in forming an accurate image of how these characters' lives flow.

      Ishiguro frequently utilizes foreshadowing, but the most obvious times he uses it is to warn the reader about how a certain story of Kathy's will fit into the bigger picture. Honestly, I much prefer this type of foreshadowing to deep, you-really-have-to-be-paying-attention foreshadowing. Because of all of the warnings about how each story is important in the grand scheme of events, I find myself paying more attention to details in Kathy's little anecdotes. And I think I'm getting a better view of the story as it is.