Vonnegut uses foreshadowing throughout the narrative. Foreshadowing is a literary device that is used to allude to a future event or future information without naming it. Both the mural, “The Happy Garden of Life,” and the song are used to foreshadow the horror of euthanasia in the world of the story. Foreshadowing is often employed to make the significance of the information or event that is revealed greater. In this case, it has the effect of making euthanasia even more horrible because the banality of a hospital mural and pop song highlights how normalized the idea is for the society that sees euthanasia as a necessary good rather than an evil. Foreshadowing also works to engage the reader further in the story, because it requires the reader to put information together, solve a puzzle, and thus become more invested in the significance of whatever is being foreshadowed.

Irony is used heavily throughout the story. Vonnegut begins the story with verbal irony—when someone says one thing but means the opposite. The narrator says, “Everything was perfectly swell” (Paragraph 1). Meanwhile, Wehling must decide whether to kill his children, his grandfather, or someone else.