A Matter of Life or Death - kill off main character??

Kill him off for a good reason. That's all I can say.

Yes! Kill him for a change. But remember some readers might not like it, and not read your books again; however, some people love surprise endings. I do!

I would kill him off, but make it a twist at the end. Maybe he could just disappear and leave it to the imagination of the reader weather or not he his dead, or not.

Good Luck.

How about introducing his replacement, gradually letting the new guy come into his own first? The new guy can have different strategies, giving you more strategies for your stories, too.

You've got the right idea trying to veer from convention, but even the unconventional is still conventional these days.

It really doesn't matter either way. Lead lives, it's been done to death. Lead dies, it's been done to death.

But I'm sure you're creative enough to make either case work.

Good luck.

Reactions against convention become faddish, too, but you can still fool critics into thinking you're unbelievably brave by killing off a beloved character, when actually you're just annoying a lot of readers. I'm thinking Sirius Black here.

There are also genre concerns. If you don't see MCs dying in all the mil-action novels you read, I'd guess readers (and editors) have a powerful preference for seeing them live, just as mystery readers expect solutions to the mystery and romance readers expect the boy and girl to get together in the end.

Kill your MC only if you have good plot or thematic reason to, not because you think it's different. It's not that different, or that new -- SPOILER ALERT: Beowulf dies in the end.

Go read Ptolemy's Gate in the Bartimaeus Trilogy. Well, no I guess he's not the MAIN character...

I'm all for killing off main characters. You should do what feels right for you and right for the story. If you want to do it do it, you're the writer after all.

If you do intend to kill him off, make it a surprise. Nothing is worse than a book that is extremely predictable. Just, make sure it is realistic. If it's something like he had a heart attack at 25, etc it will be extremely boring. Make sure it has some action!

Killing off the main character is so passé, have him go insane or something

Try it.

If you don't like how it turns out, scrap the scene/chapter and save it for another novel and character.

Best advice I can give is to try a few different endings and see which one you like best.

One thing you could do, if it fits in with your story, is have the main character do something illegal or bad in the eyes of the millitary and have him end up in prison or something. That'd be a twist.

Let us know what you decide!

Racheal

I'd say, any book should have a cathartic ending. So try to see what would work better in this context.The ending has to leave the reader uplifted, emotional, it has to make them believe that life is bloody well worth living! You might need to kill the character off to achieve it, or you might need to keep him alive. Your goal isn't really his life or death, your goal is to transform the reader emotionally. A dying hero can make the reader a better person, if only for five minutes, a surviving hero can do the same thing.