What makes for a successful resurrection?

In writing a resurrection, you need to balance several conflicting ideas: on the one hand, the death of the character should be a possibility. Otherwise, this death is cheap, meaningless. "He died, so what? He's going to come back." The last thing you want to evoke with a character's death is boredom.

On the other hand, the resurrection should be believable. It should make sense within the rules of your word. It should not be a Deus ex Machina.

And on the third hand (because two are never enough), the resurrection must not devalue the original death. If a character gave up their life for something, but later got their life back, then what have they given up? This was, for example, the main criticism against Star Trek: The Search for Spock: his dramatic death in The Wrath of Khan was devalued by his return.

So how do you balance those elements? I will present here some examples. Those are by no means the only options, but they should give you some ideas regarding what works, and why it does.

• You can play off the Jesus angle: a character gives up their life, and then they are resurrected stronger, save the day, and spiritual something. Gandalf is a well-known character who gets this treatment. First, he is, of course, a Maia - an angelic being, thus while we might plausibly believe him dead, it is not impossible within the rules of the world for Gandalf to come back. Gandalf lays down his life fighting the Balrog, and that is a catastrophe - the Fellowship is rudderless, things are going wrong. Then, Behold! Gandalf comes back, it is an eucatastrophe - Gandalf's return is the turning point of the LotR. From then n, there are hardships, but things move towards victory.
• Your character might be a skilled trickster or planner - someone for whom it would be plausible to simulate his own death and evade it. Loki is one such example. For such a character, as others point out, it would in fact be less plausible to die than to survive. Nonetheless, the shadow of doubt should be there for the reader, as well as the curiosity of how he evaded death, and when he's going to reappear.
• You can create a world where death is cheap. The Order of the Stick, a comics set in a D&D world, works under the premise that characters can be resurrected, multiple times, as per D&D rules. This is used for multiple jokes. But when an MC actually dies, there's a whole plotline of the other characters trying to get the resources to get their friend resurrected, and a parallel plotline of what the MC is doing in the afterlife in the meantime. Because death is understood not to be final, drama must be derived from other sources.

All those examples, attack the aforementioned elements in different ways: if death is understood not to be final, it is not very dramatic, and so drama must come from other places. For your particular case, since you are going to have many resurrections, it is unlikely that the readers would continue to treat death in your novel as something that might stick. You'd have to provide other stakes - something that would stick.

As for a "cheap way out", the story of death and resurrection would have to have more in it than "I need the character out of the way" and "now I need him back". In some way, the whole experience would have to be meaningful. In the aforementioned Order of the Stick example, the one where death is cheapest, the MC is affected by the people he meets in the afterlife, while his team is affected by having to do things without him. The whole thing is thus an important part of the story. For Loki, the multiple death-evasions build up his persona as a trickster-god. Note that he is implied to have "somehow" evaded death, rather than having been dead. And Gandalf, of course, is a Jesus-figure.

posted over 6 years ago

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Galastel‭

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Personally I dislike resurrections in books. They are often meant to bring back a popular character without a reason. Many did it and there is always a kind of aftertaste. Even if the character is bound to rules or something like that, there is the problem with plausibility.

Every kind of resurrection seems to be a Deus Ex Machina in my eyes. Either it helps the character to fight the most recklessly battles, or to change the outcome of some things (depending on the "resurrection"). As mentioned from Galastel before, there are several approaches in which cases the ressurection might work, like Gandalf from Lord of the Rings. If your dead character is a higher being, there is a good chance, that it would be resurrected. But normally a death should be final. You play with the readers feelings in that case.

Without Gandalf, I have never seen or read a statisfying resurrection before. It allways seems like an Deus Ex Machina, without any reason.

posted over 6 years ago

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Pawana‭

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To me a good resurrection is a good plot twist, meaning the reader could go back and re-read what went before, and see it in a new light and realize the clues for the resurrection were there, they just missed them.

Perhaps the best executed twist I've seen was in The Sixth Sense. I immediately watched the movie again, without skipping or fast forwarding, to see if it had cheated. Nope! The opposite, even more clues than I would have considered necessary were present, but so cleverly placed with other distractions I completely missed them.

A good resurrection cannot be a cheat. Your clues don't have to be blatant, but they need to be there. You can hide them "in the light", i.e. have the clue be a throwaway event or conversation that is lost in the glare of a more dramatic event. So you intentionally make your character say things or do things that seems innocuous, but are not; they are the clues, but put these moments in places where the reader is already anticipating something else, and this doesn't fit so it gets ignored. Or put them a page or two before an "explosion:" A fight scene, a sex scene, some other memorable moment so the glare of that encourages the reader to forget the quiet clue that came just before it.

Separately, you can also foreshadow resurrection. That can be explicit: Your hero kills somebody in battle he was certain was dead, but no explanation is given. Or meets somebody he had heard was dead (Samuel Clemens; "The news of my demise has been greatly exaggerated!")

Or foreshadowing can be indirect: The resurrectee figuratively resurrects something else, a love relationship, a cell phone she thought he ruined by dropping it in dishwater, a "dead" car. Or she experiences a resurrection, visiting a school/college reunion and resurrecting an old friendship that had ended in acrimony over a boy they both now hate (eg. she blamed her friend when she should have blamed her boyfriend). (and refers to it as such).

posted over 6 years ago

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Amadeus‭

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