ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of dead narrators and characters in English literary history. Dead characters thus urge people to blend features that people associate with the living and characteristics that people attribute to the dead. Mark Turner explains the process of blending by pointing out that “cognitively modern human beings have a remarkable, species-defining ability to pluck forbidden mental fruit – that is, to activate two conflicting mental structures and to blend them creatively into a new mental structure”. The Lovely Bones, in contrast, invites people to picture a situation in which the dead narrator continues to influence the world she had to leave. One can perhaps explain this dead narrator scenario in terms of our difficulties to envision death as the definite end of people's existence, or in terms of the wishes of the bereaved that the dead somehow continue to exist.
