The Complete Guide to POV

First Person Posthumous

A little bit of tidying up to do, before the Complete Guide is complete.

Today, I’ll look at the First Person Past Tense narration by a character revealed, at some point, to be dead.

This used to be seen as breaking a pact with the reader, that the narrator had survived the action they were describing.

However, it has become quite common, particularly since Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002).

Here’s how that opens, with full disclosure of the narrator’s posthumous state —

My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. In newspaper photos of missing girls from the seventies, most looked like me: white girls with mousy brown hair. This was before kids of all races and genders started appearing on milk cartons or in the daily mail. It was still back when people believed things like that didn’t happen.

Obviously, that it is speaking — and viewing the world — from beyond the grave, grants this POV great narrative potential but also hard limits.

Unless they have also gained control over time, a posthumous First Person Past Tense narrator is likely to be akin to a Third Person Narrator who is jogging along with the action, watching it from outside.

Again, this is assuming the First Person Narrator can only be in one place at once.

I’m not sure I’ve read an example of a posthumous narration where death has meant the character becomes multiple.

The closest I can think of is Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. This is a great example of a novel in which a First Person Past Tense Narrator is able to be in multiple locations — because the main character we follow, Breq, is/are one of a number of AI-controlled bodies.

The hard limits of the I-realised-I-had-become-a-ghost POV may be that the character can only helplessly witness, and narrate, what is continuing to happen with the living people they love and hate, moment by moment.

In order to keep up with a complex ongoing action, they will have to rush or zap from place to place. Meaning that, if two crucial scenes are taking place at the same time, one will pass unwitnessed, and the First Person Past Tense Narrator — just like a normal living person — will have to construct a version of it later. They will have to overhear someone conveniently talking about it, or read another person’s diary, or — more subtly — build a conjecture from how the people involved subsequently behave.

However, the reason for the Posthumous Narrator having been chosen in the first place is, most likely, that the writer wants to tell a story of someone discovering the truth about what went on in their life (leading up to and perhaps causing their death) in a way they never would have done if they hadn’t become a ghost.

A ghost can become a super-eavesdropper on the events following their own death. They have a clear reason for wanting to know this stuff — which a dispassionate Third Person Omniscient Narrator, unless they are somehow personified as lovely and caring, completely lacks. And, with all the secret knowledge they’re acquiring, the ghost is likely to be able to position themselves so as to witness the most informative and important scenes that happen during the days or months or years they continue to be around.

The writer gains the advantages of a Third Person POV always being where the action is, with the added bonus that what is witnessed is of great emotional import to the narrator.

Yet if the ghost narrator can’t intervene in some way, if they’re incapable of returning to life to retake their place in the story, or of moving even a single grain of sugar in the living world, then that hard limit may become frustrating to the reader. The main character might seem to be trapped behind soundproofed glass, banging and screaming at those who have survived them, for the whole of the book.

The temptation is, to have them somehow, by breaking through a ghost-limit, change the lives of the living. This is what happens in the movie Ghost (1990). There is also a final scene in which the dead can speak clearly, not through poltergeist activity, to the living. And the audience weeps.

Just to note — unless they approach even closer to an Omniscient Third Person Narrator, the Posthumous Narrator is not able to visit the heads of the people they are observing, and so cannot hear their thoughts directly.

This will lead to a by-default show, don’t tell POV in which anything that one of the non-narrating characters thinks or feels has to be externalised into dialogue (‘You know, I’ve been feeling so different since X died — so liberated…’) or action (‘As I watched, I saw my best friend go into my bedroom, stick her head into my wardrobe — where the coats were — breathe in deeply, and then spit three times.’)

Since The Lovely Bones, posthumous narrators have become far more common. But there are earlier examples. (You’ll find plenty if you google Ghost Narrators.)

I’d included a posthumous chapter in my novel deadkidsongs (Penguin, 2001).

In American pulp writer (and so much more) Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me (Lion Books, 1952), the brutal narrator seems to have died before the final word.

And it was like I’d signaled, the way the smoke suddenly poured up through the floor. And the room exploded with shots and yells, and I seemed to explode with it, yelling and laughing… and… and…

However, the narration continues for three more paragraphs.

At the time, this climax must have come as a real shock to the readers. And some, I’m sure, must have been disgusted not to have known all along that the guy they were listening to was some stiff.

This dying-during-the-story POV should be distinguished from that in which the action is narrated by a character who the reader knows from the very beginning is a ghost or posthumous speaker of some sort. As in The Lovely Bones.

As a rule, I’d beware of ending a story with the reveal that the narrator or main character has been dead all along but just not realised. (There are a couple of famous films that do this, but I’ll avoid spoilers.)

If a narrator is dead, they are likely to know it — unless they have somehow forgotten what killed them, or have just woken up in the afterlife after falling asleep in the land of the living.

The ghost-world very often follows very different rules to that of the conventionally alive. If there is an afterlife, with its own rules — perhaps those of Christian judgement and resurrection, or of walk-through-walls-but-not-fall-through-floors ghost stories — then the Posthumous POV has led the writing off into another fantastical genre.

Further reading:

Herbert G. Klein published a useful article in 2002, ‘The Wonderful World of the Dead: A Typology of the Posthumous Narrative’.

There are also some examples given in Peter Boxall’s Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2013, p 30-32)

Still of Saoirse Ronan in The Lovely Bones.