Do modern readers believe the first person narrator can't die?
Back in highschool in the 90s we had an assignment to write an extra chapter for a book. After some discussion the teacher told us that under no circumstances can we kill the protagonist as the book was being told in first person and therefore the protagonist must survive to now be telling us the story.
Is this a way modern readers think? Do most people feel safe reading a work thinking that the protagonist will not die, not even on the last sentence of the book?
I remember Kickass specifically addresses this, reminding the viewer that he might be telling this story from heaven. Is this something that the reader has to be told to not feel safe? Has this trope been done enough now that the narrator is in danger?
Also does the tense of the work matter? Does putting a story in present tense make the narrator more logical to die as he is telling the story now, and not having survived after the fact?
To make it clear, I am not asking if I am allowed to kill the narrator without betraying the reader. I am asking if first person reduces tension.
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I would say I specialize myself in first person short stories narrated in past tense where the narrator abruptly dies at the end. It's kind of specific, but oh well.
In my experience, most people don't expect this, although I am not sure if it is because of the narration style or because death comes to the narrator without foreshadowing. Another factor could be that my narrator is usually the protagonist, and people don't tend to expect the death of the main character because we are generally used to happy endings.
Logic would tell us that if it is being narrated in past tense, and not part of an "episodic" narration (think a journal), the narrator managed to survive to tell us their story, but there are three possible exceptions: the narrator is narrating just before expiring, in a surprisingly lucid last instant where time stops and they get to analyze the events that led to their demise; the narrator shifts to present tense right before the end, as if the story was one big flashback; or the narrator is indeed narrating their story post-mortem, whether it explicitly alludes to afterlife or not. I have written stories in the first and second cases, and the one I wrote using the first style is one of my favourites.
Tension almost always will arise not from the protagonist's life being at a stake, but from anything else. People often expect happy endings where the protagonist gets to live, unless we are clearly writing a tragedy or a horror story. Nobody expects the action hero to die, so you can use this to your advantage and let the reader get their guards down for the grand cruel finale.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/35260. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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I suspect that most reader expect the narrator is not going to die. But you should not look on the device of the involved narrator as requiring the maintenance of strict logic about when the story was written down.
Using an involved narrator is a literary device. It is not intended to imply that the narrator at some point after the end of the story sat down at a keyboard and started typing. In most cases it is just a storytelling device, and you should not take it as anything other than that.
There are cases, of course, in which we are explicitly told that the story we are reading is a manuscript written by the person the tale it told to. This kind of "found manuscript" story was quite popular in 19th century adventure novels.
For an example, look at Kipling's story The Man Who Would be King. It is related by the author (as in the text tells you that this is the author speaking) and tells how he was visited by the protagonist both before and after his adventure, and how the protagonist told the tale on his second visit.
But this too is a device, a kind of frame that allows the author to introduce additional information. There is no need at all to allow for the possibility of the narrator actually writing down the story at any point. That would make no sense for many novels that use this technique. If your involved narrator dies, no reasonable or sophisticated reader is going to say, "wait, this is implausible, if he died when did he tell this story?"
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