Playing With / Dead to Begin With

Basic Trope Description: A work begins with the main character being already dead.

• Straight: The Dark Fantasy novel Alice and the Great Beyond begins with Alice waking up as a ghost on her own fresh grave, and (to her own surprise) dead.
• Exaggerated: The whole cast of Alice and the Great Beyond consists of nothing but dead people who are already dead at the beginning.
• Downplayed: In the beginning of Alice and the Great Beyond, we see Alice dying in a hospital bed.
• Justified:
  • The whole work is to be set in the afterlife.
  • Alice was murdered, and her ghost is restless about the fact. She wants to find her murderer and bring them to justice.
• Inverted:
  • Alice is dead in the end.
  • Alice is still unborn at the start.
• Subverted: At the start of Alice and the Great Beyond, Alice is dead, but only to be resurrected in the first chapter.
• Double Subverted: What fails. She stays dead.
• Enforced: The author is setting up a Fish out of Water situation so the reader can explore the story's afterlife alongside Alice.
• Averted: Alice is alive in the beginning.
• Zigzagged: Alice first doesn't know whether she is alive or dead in the beginning: people seem to ignore her, but she was already an outsider during her life. She is on a cemetery at night and woke up on a grave, but had that situation before when she was passed-out drunk. She seems to meet people like Napoleon, Caesar and Marilyn Monroe, but there is a motto party going on nearby. Then someone just walks through her...
• Parodied: Alice literally lives a quite normal life in a little flat under the ground, and her tombstone marks her house.
• Invoked: Alice kills herself hoping for at least some adventure in the afterlife.
• Exploited: Dracone gaslights Alice into believing she's in Hell and makes her ashamed for her life.
• Defied: Alice is protected with a spell that will allow her spirit to rest eternally.
• Lampshaded: "And the first thing I get is the sight that I was apparently buried today."
• Discussed:

"I just woke up here and now I am dead! Why? I literally don't remember anything...""Don't worry, sweetheart. Most of us had that when they first arrived here."

• Conversed: "What would you think when you would wake up like that? I think I would freak out."
• Played for Drama: Alice is scared at the revelation, and is gaslit into believing that she is in Hell. She isn't, but there is still a lot to discover. While quite scary, most creatures prove to be Creepy Good. But one of the factual monsters fled the Great Beyond, and it looks like if it is responsible for Alice's death.
• Implied: We never see Alice alive, not even in flashbacks.