Oops, my mistake - missed a key point in yesterday's post on Closely Watched Trains

Letting yesterday's blog post stand even though it's a testament to my stupidity - or, to be fair (to myself), evidence of how difficult (for me) or different anyway it is absorbing a story by listening as opposed to by reading - we were finishing Brohumil Hrabal's novella "Closely Watched Trains" the other night and M. read the last chapter aloud as we were driving home from Cambridge - and - amazingly, I totally missed the point that the narrator dies in the last scene of the novel. It's kind of an odd death, as he's a first-person narrator, so you have to imagine or accept the the novella itself is one of those life-flashes-before-your-eyes in the last moments - but, still, he clearly dies, shot by a German soldier as he completes the act of sabotage on the munitions train (he shoots the German soldier, who dies also) - cannot quite remember the end of the movie but I think in the film he's shot by a German sniper but he doesn't kill the German soldier in return fire. Book group universally like Closely Watched Trains - moved by the humor, the sense of bureaucratic life and state service in a totalitarian state, the overt sexuality, the comic array of characters; I noted that the book among many other things is a journey from innocence to experience, on the part of the narrator, and also a sly and subversive anti-authoritarian text - posing as a novella about the resistance to the Nazi occupation in WWII but unmistakably to its contemporary Czech readership a novella about resistance to the Soviet state - the Soviets got the message and banned this book. Wonder why Hrabal, however, never attained the international reputation later enjoyed by Kundera?