Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons^™

From Beyond The Grave: Dead Narrators In Young Adult Literature, Jessica L. Branton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While scholars and critics have explored various aspects of young adult literature, few have focused on the popular, but odd, use of dead narrators. When examining the dead narrators of Veronica Roth’s Allegiant, Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why, Lauren Oliver’s Before I Fall, and Jess Rothenberg’s The Catastrophic History of You and Me, it becomes clear that the dead narrators are used as a foil for adolescent growth and maturation, and they also allow young readers to empathize with and accept death through the protagonists. These protagonists experience a proto-adulthood as they die too soon to …