A Look at The Author stabbed me.

By Rembrandt - internet, Public Domain,

The Philosopher in Meditation

“If determinism is true for everything that happens, it was already determined before you were born that you would choose cake. Your choice was determined by the situation immediately before, and that situation was determined by the situation before it, and so on as far back as you want to go.” - Thomas Nagel, What Does It All Mean?: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy (1987), Ch. 6. Free Will

The Author

Who is “the Author”?

In a work of fiction, the author is the giver and taker of life, the creator and destroyer, the composer of the genesis and the revelations. Life and death should never be a simple decision.

The Responsibility of the Author and the Reader

The Death of a Character

The death of a character in a story is not a simple or lightly make-able choice. You, as the author, have a connection with your characters, no matter how distant that connection may be. The choice shouldn't be easily made or you may as well be murdering the character yourself. And even with the countless processing of this decision, you, in the end, will still be the killer, not those who you put to kill them, for they are merely your tool for carrying out the act.

You, as the reader, have to realize that, even if there is no way of helping a dying character in a story, you never the less, are just sitting there reading, “Staring at them as they die.” These words are not to scare you from reading a story, but help you understand the responsibility of being a reader, and how important you are in all the process of “reading a story”.