Treasure Island

To read the opening paragraph of Treasure Island is a bit like sneaking a look at the last page first. When you come to the end of the first sentence, you know that the treasure-seeking voyage is over and was successful — with part of what was found still left on the island — and that at least three of the major characters (although you do not yet know that they are major characters), the squire, the doctor, and the narrator, have survived it. That you are told these details at the outset does not affect your reading of the story, because you can tell from the tone of the paragraph that the story is not about whether Treasure Island and its cache of riches can be found but about how the story unfold and all the particulars that take place on the way. It is, in other words, about an adventure. And you believe in that adventure because its details are set down in writing by someone who experienced it, someone whom you are inclined to trust because he is recording it at the request of other men who experienced it, too. Thus, Stevenson's first-person narrator immediately transcends fiction and becomes, for the willing reader, a real person writing about real events.