Elizabeth McCracken’s “It’s Bad Luck to Die” is a story told from a first-person point of view and filled with symbolism. Almost immediately, readers can tell the story is written in the past tense. Lois, the narrator begins by speaking about a few of her tattoos that her late husband created on her body. The narrator describes the first time she met Tiny, her husband,
I met Tiny the summer I graduated high school, 1965, when I was eighteen and he was forty-nine…We drove to Tiny’s shop over on East 14th because that’s where Steve, the crazy boy, had got the banter that had a toehold on his shoulder. (4)
This is the point in which the story shifts from present tense to past tense. The narrator is telling the story of her and Tiny 27 1/2 years after they had met. While telling this story, the narrator is unreliable because she only explains her version of the truth, in which her emotions may cloud her judgement of a situation, rather than the full truth of how it may look from Tiny’s point of view or the narrator’s mother’s point of view.