Dave Farrell writes from Cape Town, under the heading ‘I narrate, therefore I am’, to join the discussion started by my post about The Human Stain:
I don’t agree with these literalist standpoints about the narrator. Two of the finest films of the past 50 years are narrated by dead men: Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, which begins with the narrator floating dead in a Beverly Hills swimming pool; more recently Sam Mendes’s American Beauty, which begins: “My name is Lester Burnham. This is my neighborhood; this is my street; this is my life. I am 42 years old; in less than a year I will be dead. Of course I don’t know that yet, and in a way, I am dead already.” That breaks all the rules and it works just fine.