prefigurement

You have my permission to take the plot line, about a retired general struggling with a Vermont resort hotel during a winter without snow, as a prefigurement of global warming, if you wish.

Yet even this bare moment is clothed by prefigurement: We grasp, even as we read, that Williams will turn it into the cannibalistic climax of “Suddenly, Last Summer.”

It’s a question also raised by the second note on the album’s opening track: bowling off toward somewhere brighter and more hopeful, a prefigurement of the songs to follow, which are punchier and more immediate.

“Ultimately,” Siebert writes, “Zootopia is not a reinvention of the zoo as much as a prefigurement of its inhabitants’ only possible future … a wilderness with us lurking at its very heart.”

He does not believe that Jonah spent three days in a whale's belly—nor do they; he does not believe that Jonah's deep-sea adventure was a prefigurement of the burial of Jesus Christ—nor do they; he does not believe that the Jonah story is any the truer because Jesus Christ really or apparently believed it—nor do they; he simply believes that the story's moral is a good one, as far as it represents people who are not Jews as entitled to consideration—and so do they.