1st person story, but the main character will die in the end and some of the story needs to be told after his death. How to solve this problem?

I see two problems. First, if the person died, how did the story come to be set down in writing? This is a problem whether the story continues after the narrator's death or not. Some readers will accept this; others will not.

The second problem is the use of only an epilogue. Readers often feel swindled if a new POV suddenly appears after the MC dies. This can be a problem even for single-POV third person narrations.

One way way to reduce the second problem is to add not only an epilogue, but a frame. Open the story from a different character's POV, then close the story from within the same frame narrator's POV.

A frame can also help with the first problem, as long as the frame narrator has some reason to know the first person story. Not just the story, but the first person story. Even better is if there is some strong relationship between the two narrators.

posted about 11 years ago

CC BY-SA 3.0

Dale Hartley Emery‭

660 reputation 2 42 128 0

There are a few ways to solve this:

1) Switch narrators.

Everything is told by your main character until his/her death, at which point some other character finishes the story.

2) Your narrator continues narrating from after death in some supernatural fashion.

Your narrator could become a ghost or spirit, wander disembodied, communicate through Ouija board/séance, etc.

This was done very subtly in the novel Song of Achilles, written from the first-person perspective of Achilles's partner Patroclus. Patroclus is killed by Hector. (I assume I'm not spoiling anyone for the Trojan War...) But for the Greeks, a person's soul couldn't enter Hades (the underworld) until s/he was given proper funeral rites and his/her grave marked. So Patroclus is able to stay on as a disembodied soul for the last 15% of the book, telling us what happened after his death. (I won't spoil the ending of that novel. Go read it. Moving, beautiful, amazing. I cried.)

3) Switch narrative styles.

If it's literally only a page and a half, change to a third-person narrative style, maybe even set it in italics, to make it clear it's an epilogue because your first-person narrator is dead.

Or have a series of newspaper articles, blog posts, emails, letters, etc. reporting/discussing what happened after your narrator's death.

ETA

4) See the answers to this question: Ways for main character to influence world following their death

I'd forgotten about this question earlier. It's not a duplicate by any means, since your story is not interactive, but you may find something useful in those answers.

posted about 11 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Lauren Ipsum‭

2098 reputation 13 1143 397 1