Uhm…I was just echoing pseudotriton ruber ruber there, because it’s, like, such a good shot of the poor guy in the pool. Uh huh.
I suppose I assumed that people who didn’t want any plot details divulged would steer clear of a thread where the title mentioned there’d be spoilers. But, on reflection, you’ve got a point ianzin. I could have worded the spoiler box better.
I’m a he by the way. Otherwise I’d be Cuntatrix.
Sky of Swords by Dave Duncan.
The Hollow Man by Dan Simmons.
Fallen is a contender, though the character who dies is, and is not, the narrator.
Cuntatrix is to Cockatrice as Sybilisk is to Basilisk.
I suppose you’ll be telling me next that you never tasted an egg!
Would Flowers for Algernon count? Tho’ I don’t remember if the narrator dies, he’s certainly very diminished at the end. Very, very sad book.
The implication is sure there that he’s going to die, like Algernon did. But he’s still alive at the end of the book.
How about Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities or Camus’ L’Etranger? And would Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, or MacBeth count?
And in Mythos stories it’s common for narrators and other major characters to die - or worse - during the story.
Crap, I’m an idiot. Hyperlinks show up in spoiler boxes :smack:
The film All That Jazz is unusual in that it was autobiographical but Bob Fosse decided to change his own story by having “himself” die of the heart attack he survived in real life.
In the Cut by Susanna Moore published in the 90s ends with the death of the narrator. Several years later it was made into a movie starring Meg Ryan that I haven’t seen due to extremely low expectations. I have no idea if the movie ends the same way. If you’re looking for a link for the book, which I won’t put in the spoiler boxes to avoid the visible hyperlink problem, it can be found here.
Kurt Vonnegut’s
Galapagos is narrated by the ghost of a deserter from Vietnam.
No, it doesn’t, although I was expecting it to end that way from about half-way in. I liked that movie, although mainly for the various literary allusions, rather than the whodunnitness of it all. I should really check out the book, although I suspect that it will destroy my regard for the film.
John Ridley’s book Love Is a Racket A fun read, if not great literature, and while the ending probably shouldn’t be a surprise, it is.
Since several movies have been mentioned, I’ll add Menace II Society.
Y’know, I’ve never seen the whole movie (I’m ashamed), but doesn’t Sunset Boulevard begin with the finding of the narrator’s dead body?
For that matter, how about D.O.A. and its many imitators (and predecessor)
Dunno if this counts, but the children’s book Rose Blanche starts out first-person, then switches to third-person halfway through, and then the kid who narrated the first half dies at the end.
Douglas Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma is narrated not by the title coma bound girlfriend, but IIRC Jarred, the character’s classmate and friend, who dies in the first chapter and narrates sporatically as a ghost, and later appears.