In this experience self-consciousness learns that life is as essential to it as pure self-consciousness. (§189)
This is crucial. According to Hegel, the struggle for death does not leaddirectly to the shape of master and servant. At first, the immediate self-consciousness rather sticks exclusively to its “pure being-for-itself”, and since to that effect it has nothing to lose, it can experience no fear and can only persist in fighting. Only the dull counting of futile deaths makesthe survivors understand that there is more in self-consciousness. 

“The dissolution of that simple unity is the result of the first experience.” (§189) It has now become aware that “both moments are essential” (§189). To be (recognized), both pure being-for-itself and life, both independence and dependence have to be thought in unity. And only after the acknowledgment of this lesson, the life and dead struggle can be engaged again – now leading to a different outcome where the simpleminded self-consciousness may still be ready to persist indefinitely while the other, informed by previous experience, recedes and accepts the subordinate standing of an object. “The former is the master, the latter is the servant.” (§189)

Zdravko Kobe: True Sacrifice, on Hegel’s Presentation of Self-Consciousness