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Dead Characters

by abookaweek on August 07, 2006

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I’ve recently read two books which featured important characters who are already dead by the time the books begin. In Abide with Me, Tyler Caskey’s wife Lauren has recently died of cancer. In Light on Snow, Nicky’s mother and sister were killed in an automobile accident the year before the book opens. Of course it is the deaths of these characters that precipitate much of the action and emotions of these two books.

In both books, we meet the characters in flashback and memories. In the case of Lauren, from Abide with Me, the accounts do not match; the selfish, immature woman we meet in flashback bears little resemblance to the idealized woman that Tyler holds in his memory. This dissonance illustrates much about Tyler’s character. Nicky’s mother and baby sister, in Light on Snow, are more consistent, but less well developed as characters.

As I thought about these characters, I also thought about other dead characters in other books. Shreve gives us another one in The Pilot’s Wife. Most of that book is the story of a wife peeling back the layers of what she knows about her dead husband to reveal a man she does not recognize.

Another dead character I remember very strongly is the character of Chris, in Life Before Man, by Margaret Atwood. It is his suicide (and the other characters’ reactions to it) that is the driving force for much of what happens in that story. In many ways he is a more vital character than the living ones, who for the most part spend a lot of time moping around.

Other dead characters that come to mind are the two sons (Tim and Tom) in John Irving’s A Widow for One Year. We only meet these boys through descriptions of their photographs, and in one harrowing account of their deaths, narrated by their mother before she disappears.

One of the most famous dead characters is Rebecca, in Daphne Du Maurier’s book of the same name. What are some other dead characters? I’m not talking about ghosts. And not about characters who die part way through a book. I want to consider characters who are dead throughout the book, and who are only featured through memories, posthumous descriptions, and flashbacks, yet whose influence is central to the book’s actions and themes.

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