at least thoughs are only individual charictors, dougas adams managed to kill off the entire cast of hitchikers and all their alturnate versions in the final book (after already haveing done away with mavin in the book before). the bastard, miss him though.
mind you having written a few things myself it is very tempting to kill of your own charictors, though i can’t really expain this feeling.
See, I feel just the opposite. I have a hard time with the idea of killing off characters. I especially think I’d have trouble if it were for a TV show with an actual person’s job riding on it. Maybe that’s why I suck at writing fiction.
Speaking from my own limited authorship experience, I killed off main, favorite characters because it heightened the drama. Oh, the tragedy when Sick Sword died in the sequel to IUDC !
Well, Bean, from Ender’s Shadow (and the following sequels) is dying because of his genes. It’ll be sad when he does die.
But I thought the saddest death I have ever read was in Stephen King’s Cujo, with the death of four-year-old Tad Trenton. When his mom finally gathers up the courage and rage to go out there and kill Cujo, Tad dies at the same moment the dog dies. She was so close! If only she had gone out a few minutes earlier or something.
Also in the series “A song of ice and fire” well…um…
ok, I’m not going to spoil it. Them. Heh.
But the question was “why?” The answer is because it works. I admire George RR Martin to have the strength to make the choices he does in his novels. At certain deaths I was heartbroken, but, continuing on with the story, I realized that he made the story stronger in a way it never could have been if he had taken the easy way out and kept everyone alive.
There’s a difference between killing off a character in a single book and killing off a series character.
I mean, if you go back to ancient times, Homer has Hector killed off in the Iliad, by that egotistical bastard Achilles, who is himself killed by an arrow to the foot.
Dickens made his reputation by killing off Little Nell.
Authors kill beloved characters in a book because that creates a moving and emotional situation for the reader and for the other characters.
It’s often different when an author kills off a series character, such as Conan Doyle throwing Sherlock Holmes off the waterfall… of couse, Doyle eventually repented and brought Holmes back to life.
I’ll never forgive the folks at UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS for sending Lady Margery to American on the Titanic.
Yeah, I respect Martin for not always telegraphing to the reader which characters are going to die. But I have to be in a certain kind of mood for these books…narrative conventions can be so comforting sometimes.
Every
Single
Character
In
The
Book ALL of them. After Garp is offed by the tongueless psychotic feminist, he has a little epilogue where the writer, John Irving, sums up how everyone in the book bites it. Not just the major characters, but literally, everyone who showed up in some incidental manner, just for a few pages, gets an obituary, with the exception of the narrator and the guy who got his penis bitten off. This, mind you, is after Garp’s eldest son is killed in a car crash and his mother is assassinated by a psychotic misogynist.
I cried like a little girl when I finished that book.
I got you all beat. I mourned for a year when I read that Chewbacca was killed off in The New Jedi Order: Vector Prime. Although they did give him a great death scene… they dropped a moon on him. One of the greatest death scenes I’ve ever read.
I’m currently reading Harry Turtledove’s Great War series. Being set in an alternate WWI, it, unsurprisingly, has a lot of deaths.
The several that were named characters all hit me in some way, but the only one that had me yelling ‘Damn, you, Turtledove, how could you?’ was
s
p
o
i
l
e
r
s
p
a
c
e
Paul Mantarkis. Not only was he one of my favourite characters in the book…not only did his death mean the POV character in his unit became the incredibly annoying Gordon McSweeney (the ONLY POV character in the books to actually scare me)…but…he had an embarrassingly stupid death…shot in the leg! Of all things… Shee…
And while I’m sure C K Dexter knows this, for those who may not, Achilles does not die in The Iliad, which ends with Achilles returning Hector’s body to his parents who then have a large funeral for him while the Trojan War is put on hold for a few days.
But back to the OP -
Agatha Christie killed off Hercule Poirot, but I can’t remember the title of the book (It’s been a while). The reason behind the death, as I recall hearing it, was that Poirot was her favorite character and she didn’t want anyone else writing hiim after her own death.
I suppose it was inevitable, given the message that the author was trying to get across, but i was still pretty devastated the first time i read All Quiet on the Western Front and Baumer got killed a week before the Armistice.
And actually, MY reading said that she HATED Poirot, and wanted to kill him off much sooner, but the public wouldn’t let him. According to my sources, her actual favorite hero was Jane Marple.
