Posthumous Narration: Difference between revisions

Occasionally, in watching a show or film that features a narration in voice over, you find that the narration is ''not'' because the writers got too lazy to show what's happening, but because they want to present you with the odd phenomenon of a deceased character telling you the story. There's no explanation given for why or how this character can tell the story in question, or whom he's telling it to; we don't see him (assuming it's him) as a ghost, or as a character writing or speaking his last words. He's just a very talkative voice that happens to belong to [[Posthumous Character|a character who doesn't survive the movie]].

 

 

{{deathtrope}}

* Played straight in the final episode of ''[[Doctor Who Confidential]]'', in a section called "River Song's Story" - River Song sums up the events of her life [[Timey-Wimey Ball|in the order she experiences them, as opposed to the order the viewers saw them]], up to and including her death. Justified in that her consciousness was subsequently saved in a computer, and it's that version of her narrating the story, post-[[Doctor Who/Recap/S30/E09 Forest of the Dead|"Forest of the Dead"]]. We see her telling the end of the story at the end of that episode.

* Subverted in an episode of the sitcom ''[[Wings (TV series)|Wings]]''. An episode opens with Joe face down in a pool in a shot intentionally reminiscent of the opening of ''[[Sunset Boulevard]]'', with a voiceover from Joe telling us that he's going to show us how he got there. At the end of the episode (Part I of a two-parter where Joe leaves Sandpiper Air and Brian, Lowell and Helen have to figure out how to track him down and convince him to come back) it's revealed that he was face down in the pool because he was setting a new breath-holding record at a wild party.

 

=== Video Games ===

 

=== Web Comics ===

* In a Poem Within A Book example, "The Legion's Pride", recited by a soldier in ''[[Lord Darcy|A Study In Sorcery]]'', is couched as a posthumous declaration by another [[Alternate History|Anglo-French]] soldier, who'd died during a peacekeeping mission to avert conflict between rival German baronies.

* In an oddly justified example, the story of ''The Children's Hospital'' by Chris Adrian is told by "the recording angel," a being required to observe and record in exact detail [[The End of the World as We Know It]] and the life of a woman (our protagonist) who will play a key role in it, from her birth to her death. Said recording angel just happens to be what is left of the main protagonist's older brother, who committed suicide as a teenager, several years before the events of the book. In the midst of the story, he occasionally cuts back to a childhood memory of himself and the protagonist, although he never refers to the brother in the first person in these scenes.

 

=== Live-Action TV ===