Pretty straighforward question. I imagine this kills tension, especially if your story has a fair share of life-or-death situations, but I feel you can perhaps compensate this lost tension by having different types of stakes in the narrative. Death is not the only bad outcome that exists, after all. What do you guys think?
i was just reading an article about this; a story opens with a woman at gunpoint, and her first-person narrative all but tells the reader that she's not going to die. it was a really well done passage that made me want to continue reading because i didn't have to waste my time wondering and worrying over the MC. instead i could chew on the other really exciting questions: how does she escape the gunman? how did she get in to this situation in the first place? who is the guy she's with? is he going to be okay too? i don't think you necessarily will kill tension if you manufacture more of it in different ways. it's a clever narrative twist when done right.
Yeah, I think you can still put your mc in peril without threatening to kill them exactly. Depends on how it's established that they're going to survive. Do we know that they're going to survive and be in good mental and physical health, or do we just know that they exist in some capacity? 'Cause you can do a lot to a character and still technically leave'em alive Threaten to lop off their arms, threaten to take out their eyes, threaten to paralyze them, threaten them with a blow to their head that might give them severe dementia ... As long as you're explicitly not threatening to kill them but rather to damage them, there can still be tension. There's worse things than death.
That’s the case for every prequil, every flashback, every franchise story that relies on the characters going on to the next novel. Personally, I find the hype for such peril to be tedious and detracts from the enjoyment. If the ad/preview advised, “See how Kirk talks his way out of it this time!” rather than “Will he survive the encounter?” it would be less jarring.
Most stories don't end with anyone dying. It's not at all odd. That said, I wouldn't say it's a great start for a story that involves tension generated through risk to life and limb. If you've got some other set of problems in mind, it's not a big deal. It's a much bigger deal otherwise.
I agree with the other posters that it can work. As an example that is perhaps from a completely different genre, I believe that it happens in An Elephant in the Garden by Micheal Morpurgo. I'm sure it's one of those books where the protagonist is elderly and telling a story about something that happened during their childhood...you still get to worry about what happened to their companions and the consequences that had on the protagonist and their life between the story and the age they're at now.
Most novels have a central question that ties in to the central conflict/main plot. If the central question of your novel is "Will she survive?" then having the answer to that question will ruin the suspense, yes. But there are lots of other central questions you can ask.
I've not read a lot of stories where the MC dies, so for me I kind of imply that the MC survives. If he/she should die, I'd probably have a crisis of conscience. But I think @BayView and @izzybot have put it best into words. I am not reading to find out if the MC dies. I am reading to watch a character grow. I want to see him struggle against insurmountable odds and do the same by proxy. I want to live his life (anyone who's read something from my main story, please forget the previous six words ). I don't question if I survive at each page. In fact, if its 'only' about if the MC survives, I'd probably feel cheated, because
That’s why I had an issue with Jay Lake’s Green. It started off with Green as an adult in her 30s writing about her life as a child and teen (where the main story takes place.) Because of this, I was unsure if I needed to continue because I knew already that Green would have to be alive in order to tell her story at all. It also didn’t help that just a few pages into Chapter One, she spoiled the fate of another character before we even got to that point hundreds of pages later. Whatever tension or grief was lost because I spent it wondering, “Is this when that character dies?” When I read, I read for the suspense of what’s going to happen to the characters, so no I didn’t appreciate Green casually informing me that the other character would eventually die by her hand. As others said, there are ways of executing this properly. I just think Jay Lake kind of handle this poorly. :/
I've been reading the Joe Ledger series again. It's told from first-person, and involves life or death situations at pretty much every turn. It's a given (at least for now) Joe isn't going to die or be seriously maimed, but Joe does bad things to bad people because he cares about good people, and there's plenty of room for good people to suffer in the situations Joe faces. When I read a story, I assume the main character is going to live, whether it's told from first-person or not. It would be bad storytelling for the main character to switch part way through the story. As for the end, they might die, but it rarely happens. There are a lot of reasons for that. One is, you as an author probably don't want to kill the potential for a series, unless you're dead-set (pun intended) on that being the end for your character. One thing that bothers me is when storytellers have a character you absolutely know isn't going to die or get seriously hurt, and the storyteller relies on trying to make you think they'll die to ratchet up the tension. James Bond, Indiana Jones, Ethan Hunt, and any superhero you can think of are all characters who aren't going to die and stay dead. It's lame to play the "Ermagherd he's dead! LOL JK" card with those kinds of characters. Some genres allow for death more easily. Fantasy, supernatural, horror...anything where a character can cross from one plane of existence to another and back again. Sometimes you can get away with that in other genres, where a character dies in surgery or something and comes back. What's more effective than that, I think--if your story involves life or death--is to go after the people your main character cares about. Of course, your story may not need life or death stakes to work, in which case it's fine if everyone lives to the end.
Just like anything in writing, You can handle improperly. However while I wouldn't go out of my way saying they would survive, as long as it's the MC, I don't see much of an issue. There are so many ways you can suffer that don't include death. Rape, Torture, Dismemberment, Poison, sickness, starvation, Loss of Ideals, Faith, ect. There are even a few things that may be even worse than death.
No, I don't think it would kill the tension. How many of us start reading a new novel with the question, 'Oh, I wonder if the MC will survive to the end?' on our minds? I would guess very very few. If this knowledge was damaging to the novel, the first-person narrative wouldn't exist.
Even if you know your main character dies, being the main character means that chances are they're not going to bite it until at least Act III because, you know, main character and all. As a result, any peril they face before then can be pretty tensionless if a writer focuses on the 'will they live' aspect the whole time instead of other things, like who else will be hurt and how will it affect the protagonist and how they'll achieve their story goals.
There was a game that kind of fooled me into thinking this. I forget which. Modern Warfare 2? It had more than one "protagonist" (in the sense that you played the role of more than one person), and one of the people you played wound up KIA. That was a hell of a thing.
This was years and years ago, and I have never played Battlefield 1. Edit: I don't think my vitriol came across. I deliberately did not purchase Battlefield 1 because A) Dice's series has not provided value commensurate with the price for a number of years now, and I'm sick of them making a living on it, and 2) Battlefield 1's gameplay has so little in common with actual first world war combat as to make me want to spit on the guy who came up with the concept. I'm usually not the guy to say, "Well, you can't make a game out of that," because I am not a big fan of prior restraint, but I had serious doubts that they could pull off a shooter set during the Great War--and boy was I right! Some of my best memories are from Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and they involve working as a team with friends in a fast-paced, hostile environment using modern weapons to achieve a semi-realistic goal. In contrast, Battlefield 1 involves completely imaginary weapons (in that their performance characteristics and even their existence has little or nothing in common with what was actually available or used during the war) in an environment that never existed and a set of goals that were in fact 100% impossible from 1914 to at least some time in 1917. ...Am I still talking about this? Jesus. I'll shut up now.
Amen to that. An incredible game. Quick story. While on holiday with all the family, the kids took their PS3 and a few games, one of which was BC2. Bored one night, I stuck it on and played it. As a result of that, I scrimped and scraped until I could afford a pre-owned PS3, just so I could buy this game. Then DICE decided to enter the race for Modern Warfare clones, and it all went to shit.
There are many stories I can think of that contain a first or third person narrator or main character whom we first meet as an older (wiser) person. The story isn't about whether they survived, but about what has happened to them along the way. They may have won the fight. They may have lost it. They may have lost somebody they love dearly along the way, or overcome huge odds, or only survived but did not attain their goals, or whatever. They might have achieved what they wanted, but it turns out to be not quite what they intended. Story tension isn't dependent upon if they live or die. You know they're going to live. So that's not what the story will be about. For me the key to whether I like a story is how I feel about it at the end, not how I feel at the beginning (except, of course, it has to draw me in from the beginning.) If I feel I've been tricked in some way, or that the story doesn't quite come together, then I'll feel cheated. But if I close the book with a feeling of satisfaction, that I've read a cracking good story, then I don't really care how the author got there. I'm a big believer in 'trust the author.' The author has chosen to tell a story a particular way, and rather than deciding ahead of time that you won't like it for whatever reason, try to give it an openminded 'go.' If you get to the end and feel cheated or simply unimpressed, then you won't trust that author again. But do trust the next one!
That! This is what I plan to do with my story. The MC much older telling about all he went through to someone. Why he's telling his life story is not told immediately, neither is his present self revealed (The reader won't know what he looks like in the present) aside from his changed personality. You just said precisely the path I had in mind.
