Chief suffocating McMurphy in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest hasn’t been mentioned in this (hee-hee) zombie thread.
That one works on so many levels.
It’s an ending which brings a lump to my throat. My recollection is slightly different however. Modesty dies when Willie is still with her; then he sets explosives around her body and tries to get away. The rest is as you described.
To the OP: when I saw the thread title I came in to mention your example. His final thoughts and feelings seemed very authentic.
Bobby Shaftoe’s death in Cryptonomicon could count.
After landing on top of a Japanese bunker, he is impaled on the antennas placed there. After cutting himself free, he fills the bunker with fuel oil. Looking to his escape route, he realizes that he isn’t going to make it, so he tosses a grenade into the opening to ignite the oil and after composing one last haiku, follows it in.
Almost a throwaway on this one.
At the climax of The Day of the Jackal…
[spoiler]Inspector Lebel and a gendarme he has randomly pulled from the crowd for assistance burst through the door of the Jackal’s sniping nest. Spinning from his position at the window, the Jackal fires his rifle at once, fatally wounding the gendarme. In that moment of greatest tension, as the hunter and the hunted finally meet, the narrative slides away into the flashes of sense and memory that progress through the gendarme’s mind as death overtakes him…
…and then back to our previously scheduled denouement. [/spoiler]
Incredibly poignant.
I have to give a shoutout to awldune upthread and say Charlotte in Charlotte’s Web. The words used to describe her death are just so poignant:
Does it count if it’s just the way I’d want to go?
If so, Lenny in Of Mice and Men.
NPR just this week had a feature about White recording portions of the book and getting choked up, time after time after time, when he got to the part about Charlotte’s death.
I’ll go with a classic and say Beth’s death in Little Women. It always got me.
His death pissed me off. He was a survivor and it just seems to me that he gave up when he still had a good chance to make it out.
Agreed. It’s in my long list of reasons that Neal Stephenson’s endings suck.
Bobby was utterly broken by that point. I have no doubt he could have put himself on autopilot and made it out alive, but having Glory taken from (for all intents and purposes) and then finding out that his son was healthy and alive gave him the sense that he could let go. No friend of Enoch Root dies unless they want to…
I totally agree. And I’ve always loved the way Hugo’s villains aren’t inherently evil, but more like flawed heroes or worthy adversaries.
But I have to mention a scene from *Atlas Shrugged. *It’s the railroad tunnel tragedy. Rand listed several passengers on the train, and how, in some way, they were actually responsible for the accident and their own deaths. It’s arguably the most “disturbing” scene she ever wrote.
Amen.
Yes.
Oh bloody hell, I’m in another zombie? Tough. I’m not backing out now. A strong “me too” for McMurphy’s mercy killing. (The film version is also one of the best in its genre.)
The one that comes to my mind is a non-sympathetic character’s demise: the mountain man’s death by arrow in Deliverance is writing at its best.
Edit: I feel better. It’s not a very old zombie. Still warm.
The death of Coth of the Rocks in James Branch Cabell’s “The Silver Stallion.” Always gets me, especially knowing his personality. (The pathos of his death is not mitigated by his behaviour in Hell afterwards, when his son encounters him in “Jurgen.”)
Another one for Snowden. And jeez, McWatt’s was incredible because you knew exactly what was going to happen- and it still got you.