Dead Narrators

A look at some recent novels that feature voices from beyond the grave

By Francisca Goldsmith -- School Library Journal, 5/1/2004

Stories about living with the loss of a loved one have become young adult literary staples. Dead parents, dead siblings, dead friends—these are familiar plotting devices in contemporary teen fiction. However, gloom isn't the motivating interest in such fare. Stories about what happens—or what could happen—when someone important to a teen dies give readers ways to explore their independence and to imagine themselves mastering a variety of demanding circumstances. They allow adolescents to grapple with big questions and to reflect on their own behavior. In recent years, however, authors are bringing readers even closer to death.

Lately, the deceased themselves have been telling their own tales. Horror and fantasy authors, of course, entertain genre readers with narrative perspectives that go beyond the bounds of human mortality. Elizabeth Chandler's "Dark Secrets" series (Pocket) features characters who seem to be reincarnations of their ancestors. Eoin Colfer's The Wish List (Hyperion/Miramax, 2003) takes its protagonist literally to hell and then gives her a chance to redeem her soul by returning her, albeit temporarily, to the land of the living. But in addition to genre writers, there seems to be a new interest by authors of realistic and literary fiction in exploring life—or at least story—after death.

Cynthia Rylant's Heavenly Village (Scholastic, 1999) explores a possible purgatory for those dead souls who weren't quite finished with pertinent business when they were shuffled off this mortal coil. The narration is that of an omniscient observer, so the storyteller may never have been a mere mortal, let alone now dead. However, the community of deceased who inhabit the Heavenly Village are very much the kind of folk employed directly by other authors to tell first-person stories from beyond the grave, so it's a good group to meet before moving on to hear the dead speak for themselves. The Heavenly Village operates on rhythms familiar to the living: daily bread is baked and sold, love letters are difficult to write, and some folks enjoy socializing during the late-night hours that most villagers reserve for sleep. These characters regularly visit the people they left back in the land of the living, both to give comfort to loved ones and to check up on others who may need help.

When writers move from telling stories of the dead omnisciently to giving the deceased the role of narrator, the tension between having been alive and being dead becomes a typical plotting conflict. In J. California Cooper's Family (Doubleday, 1990), an adult novel frequently taught in middle and high school classrooms, Clora narrates events in her family's life across a century—although she dies as a young mother, less than 50 pages into the book. Clora's story is comprised of observations of the living that she makes in the years after her own demise, but she doesn't intervene in earthly matters. In death, Clora's immediate "surroundings" seem unpopulated and without any stimulus. When one of her daughters dies, Clora notes that her offspring passes her by for some other post-life destination. In Cooper's hand, the attention of the dead is bound to the affairs of the living.

A more recent novel written for adults but finding popularity among young adults, Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones (Little, Brown, 2002), plunges readers more quickly into the narrator's passage from life to death. Upon arriving on the far side of life, 14-year-old Susie offers readers a quick sketch of her heaven's organization, but most of her narration, too, concentrates on her observations of earthly events after her death. Unlike Clora, however, Susie moves between the two planes of existence just once: about eight years after her death, she inhabits the being of one old friend just long enough to consummate her love for her childhood sweetheart.

Like Susie, Gary Soto's protagonist-narrator in The Afterlife (Harcourt, 2003) is murdered in the book's opening pages. However, whereas Susie knew the identity of her killer, both in life and in death, 17-year-old Chuy needs to work out the who and the why of the crime. Soto spins a subplot that is sure to resonate with teens: How do the recently dead relate to their bodies? The metaphysical issues of which aspects of a person make the person—whether alive or dead—him- or herself are imagined with both humor and engaging wonder. Once Susie dies, she has no physical difficulties, even though she was raped and dismembered. Chuy, on the other hand, is aghast to discover that he must learn to cope with ever-decreasing physicality across the days immediately following his death. Because Soto's story has a much shorter arc than Sebold's, we don't know how long Chuy might remain a conscious and unique being. Susie, on the other hand, remains an aware and organized essence a decade after her death. Like Clora, she is interested in and opinionated about the progress of the lives of those among whom she's no longer a vital part.

Alex Shearer's The Great Blue Yonder (Clarion, 2002) explores programmatic details of death more than Cooper, Sebold, and Soto do. For Harry, the afterlife is peopled with former neighbors and relatives who have preceded him in death, but also by folks from other eras, all of whom mingle in a pastoral limbo. Like Chuy, Harry is preoccupied with visiting those whom he has left behind in life, both family and acquaintances. His ghostly prowlings reveal surprises as he discovers the disproportion between his own sense of self-importance and the memories of him others now hold. Where Clora seems to be alone in her heaven, and Susie's current surroundings seem populated by a few folks enough like her to cause no immediate frictions, Harry's post-death world presents him with issues requiring plot resolution. One new friend waits with exasperating expectancy for his dog, another obsessively searches for his mother, and the traffic caused by newly perished souls demands manners as well as maneuvering skills. Shearer and Rylant allow the dead the most latitude in communing with the living. Harry actively communicates with his bereft sister but has less luck getting through to a former classmate—although that effort leads to some classroom shenanigans, which readers will enjoy for the humor.

Seventeen-year-old Frank died a decade before the action he recounts in Rich Wallace's Restless: A Ghost's Story (Viking, 2003) takes place. Not only is Frank narrating from the dead, but he is also discovering how his living brother and the ghost of a young man who died a century earlier are connected in the stream of immortal time. Unlike any of the other narrators considered here, Frank's life ended because of protracted illness. His demise didn't surprise his family by the time it occurred so there is no unresolved shock in need of repair. Instead, Frank's connection to the land of the living seems to come about because of his younger brother's need, at a certain age, for demonstrative guidance. Frank's story begins at the point where his living brother needs to hear from him, rather than from the point at which Frank moves from living to dead.

Frank and Harry both live in a beyond where souls from different earthly eras now commingle in an apparently eternal present. While Susie and Chuy form friendships with dead peers, Frank and Harry each enter peer relationships that crisscross historical periods.

For the most part, Susie's narrative concentrates on the continuing lives of her family, and her murderer. Chuy is concerned with what is apparently happening to him in death both physically and socially, upset by being unable to communicate with his family, whose grief he can only witness but not calm. The dead Harry, however, communicates quite directly with his sister and is frustrated when his attempts to contact other family members and friends prove unsuccessful. Frank's story is really about his brother, whom he "reaches" at a more psychic level—and, with appropriate ghostliness, within the confines of the cemetery where Frank is buried.

Frank and Harry seem to have retained such embodied parts of their being as the ability and will to run, while Chuy's story in part devolves upon the continued transformation of his physicality. Susie's physical being seems whole, in spite of her mortal flesh having been horribly damaged. Clora, beaten and abused as a slave in her lifetime, has no physical habits after death except for falling into lengthy naps between attention-grabbing events on earth.

Death is universal. Authors working with characters who are both salient and dead seem themselves to be grounded in a variety of cultural backgrounds. Cooper is African American and Clora's story is rooted in the context of American slavery. Soto is Latino and Chuy shares autobiographical details other Soto characters have personified—a kind of working-class Fresno Everyboy. Colfer and Shearer are British but their characters' trappings and sharp wit need no "translation" for American readers. Sebold's description of Susie's "heaven" is thoroughgoing in its middle-class depiction: it seems to be a suburban public school and "guardianship" is relegated to a caseworker.

Except for fantasy author Colfer's cartoon theology and Rylant's inclusion of a character called "God," none of the authors poses a religious context for his or her story. Instead, plots and themes are concerned with interpersonal relationships and moral problems that engage the narrator's curiosity as well as his or her attempts to see the right thing done. In some cases, the narrator is the moral actor—Harry's communication with his sister, Chuy's realization that he's responsible for the comfort afforded a homeless man—while, in others, the dead observe and comment upon the moral health exhibited by the living. In yet others, the dead are confronted by other dead folks' moral crises—Chuy's new friend in death is a girl who committed suicide.

Death is a human condition. Offering young readers the opportunity to hear from the other side brings it into the light of discussable topic. Like sex, death both fascinates youth and makes their elders reticent. By giving kids, parents, teachers, and librarians characters who demand discussion, writers who employ the dead to tell their stories give us all a chance to begin a difficult conversation.