Answer: Should You Ever Use the Present Tense to Describe Someone Who Is Dead?

[chomiji]

sosaith asks, "When someone is dead or something doesn't exist anymore, should you ever use the present tense to describe them?"

The answer is "it depends." Let's get down to the particulars with the cast of Rosemary Sutcliff's YA historical novel The Eagle of the Ninth - or, if you prefer, the cast of "The Eagle" (2011).

Comments

[sosaith]

Thanks for answering this for me!

[chomiji]

I hope the answer helped!

[pronker]

Neatly done; this post has so much subtlety in it! A melodramatic use would be if Character A did not know Character B is dead, and Other Characters allow Character A to persist in the belief and play along with the delusion for some reason.

[chomiji]

Thanks for the kind words! Yes - it's really interesting how subtle differences like this can have a big effect on a passage.