Monday, April 29, 2019

technique - 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 personally like to read stories told by the the main character, it's more "alive" to me. But the problem is that my character will die and some of the story will need to be told afterwards. Maybe 1 or 2 pages max.


How to solve this problem?




Answer



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.


No comments:

Post a Comment

technique - How credible is wikipedia?

I understand that this question relates more to wikipedia than it does writing but... If I was going to use wikipedia for a source for a res...