Yeah, someone beat you to American Beauty too (see OP).
How about Frankenstein? The monster’s not the narrator but he’s certainly a main character.
Also Wicked. We know she’s gonna be dead before we even start reading.
The Last Battle (last book of chronicals of narnia)
Nope. Farquhar is alive until the last line of the story; though what he sees is a fantasy, it is what is going through his mind.
A book I just got, My Name is Red is a murder story with the victim (as a ghost, of sorts) as one of the narrators.
Grave of the Fireflies – The two main characters, brother and younger sister, Seita and Setsuko, are both dead at the start of the movie, Setsuko having died some time earlier, and Seita just having died in the street while carrying her ashes in a tin. Of course, the movie then goes back in time to show why they died.
I can’t remember if it’s revealed early on or not, but Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos is narrated by a ghost.
Does “Carnival of Souls” count?
12 Monkeys and Things to do in Denver When You Are Dead.
[QUOTE=Otto]
Yeah, someone beat you to American Beauty too (see OP).QUOTE]
Well, damn.
A couple of Jim Thompson’s books have a narrator who dies by the end, meaning that at least implicitly they’ve been dead since beginning the narration. Telling you which ones would be spoiling it, however.
On the more high-brow side, the narrator of Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis’s masterwork Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, which has been translated into English as Epitaph of a Small Winner and Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, is dead from the beginning, and explicitly refers to this throughout.
The film my wife was named for, Laura (1944).
It occurs to me that dracula and Frankenstein don’t fit the bill.
Dracula is “undead”, but he’s not actually dead – he never actually died. Dracula didn’t get his vampire status by being killed by some other vampuire. He was essentially enrolled in a School for Ebvil Magic at which the price was the soul of one of the students, and he lost. (“Enroll today. Odds are that you won’t lose your soul!”)
The monster in Frankenstein (who was called “Frankenstein” in stage presentations even before the James Whale film, by the way) was, as Colin Clive correctly puts it, “never alive” before Frankenstein animated it. In fact, in the book the monster isn’t even stated to be made from put=together parts from corpses. The Creature is supposed to be a brand=spankin’-new creation, and therefore not dead.
Nope. I’d explain, but the spoiler tags aren’t working. Watch the movie.
Am I the first one to mention Desperate Housewives?
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was actually based on a book called Who Censored Roger Rabbit? and the main plot is that Roger Rabbit is dead but is back as a short lived copy of himself.
Speaking of Vonnegut, Happy Birthday, Wanda June, has a section being told by a dead little girl.
I guess Reversal of Fortune would be close, but no cigar.
I just checked, and apparently Sunny von Bulow is still alive. ::shudder::
Terry Pratchett’s Reaper Man is half about a wizard who dies at the ripe old age of 140, then comes back because Death never showed up to show him the way out…