My interest is this: that it's vanishingly rare that a first person narrator can die (we assume she lives and are entitled to assume that), but not at all rare that you can have a concluding sentence such as this: "He made me promise I'd never tell a soul [the story just narrated], and that's a promise I intend to keep." Which may be true in the fictional world. So the ontology of the first person narrator is that if they're telling the story, they're alive in their world (or they couldn't tell it); but they're not necessarily telling it in their world. That's a strong convention, but not one that is necessary, so I am interested in the receptive psychology that makes it feel so strong, makes it seem so inviolable.
no subject
My interest is this: that it's vanishingly rare that a first person narrator can die (we assume she lives and are entitled to assume that), but not at all rare that you can have a concluding sentence such as this: "He made me promise I'd never tell a soul [the story just narrated], and that's a promise I intend to keep." Which may be true in the fictional world. So the ontology of the first person narrator is that if they're telling the story, they're alive in their world (or they couldn't tell it); but they're not necessarily telling it in their world. That's a strong convention, but not one that is necessary, so I am interested in the receptive psychology that makes it feel so strong, makes it seem so inviolable.