A little brainstorming help i s required. How many famous literary characters (plays, novels, short stories, etc.) can you think of who committed suicide?
A few that come to mind:
Juliet
Willy Loman
Anna Karenina
Othello
Ophelia
Hedda Gabler
Dido
Any other names you can suggest will be appreciated.
Would you include Sidney Carton of “Tale of 2 Cities” ?
Romeo
Javert
Quentin Compson from The Sound and Fury, in Absalom! Absalom!
Would you count Rorschach from Watchmen as a suicide?
John - Brave New World
Cleopatra
Uh, yeah, literary.
The title character of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther surely counts. The book was the Catcher in the Rye of its day, inspiring numerous actual suicides among depressed youth.
That guy in Crime and Punishment…Svidrigailov, was it?
Oh, and…do suicide missions count? Y’know, Kamikaze runs, things like that?
Uuuh- you do count Shakespeare’s works as literature, don’t you? Literary does not mean fictional.
Great Ajax.
A friend recently said that he had read the fact (or factoid) that there were 52 suicides in Shakespeare’s works. A bunch of us sat around and tried to come up with that many examples, but got bogged down real quick. But if you want a bunch of names, a little digging through the plays should come up with a deckful.
(Yes, we talked about a deck of Shakespeare suicide characters modeled after the one used in Iraq. Think of the possibilities…)
Ben Kenobi. :dubious:
Seriosly though, Konstantin Treplev in Chekhov’s The Seagull.
By that logic, any documented real-life suicide in history counts. Even if you restricted it to “famous” examples, you’d have to throw in Kurt Cobain, Vincent Van Gogh, Herman Goering and even Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.
Would Therem Harth rem ir Estraven count as “famous?”
You can split hairs all you want. Show me the equivalent literary account of any of those people’s death to this account of Cleopatra’s. I’d say that it counts as literature, by any definition.
Okay, but then so do Cobain, Van Gogh, Goering, Harris and Klebold.
I think a lot of them are minor characters in the Roman plays…
The ones I could come up with off the top of my head: Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra (and her maids Charmian and Iras), Cassius, Brutus, his wife Portia, Othello, Goneril, Titus Andronicus, Lady Macbeth, and the Queen in Cymbeline. Plus dubious cases like Ophelia, Timon of Athens, Prince Arthur (in King John), and maybe even Enobarbus…
I just finished it a few months ago, but I can’t for the life of me remember what happend to Rorschach. Can someone refresh my memory?
Don’t forget Pyramus and Thisbe!
