Alive or Dead is narrated by Frederick B. Flutterbottom, a self-styled marriage guru who has little faith in professional counselors. He preps his target audience (intellectually disadvantaged husbands and hormonally enraged single men) with a short story in which a typical husband relives his seven-year marital fiasco. The manual following the story addresses various issues/problems that give rise to marital disharmony. Flutterbottom gives suggestions but no advice. His approach is simplistic, based on the sort of reasoning the typical male employs: common sense supplemented by tolerance but complicated by intellectually superior wives.
