There’s arguably another instance of this in Changes. I can’t do spoiler tags on my phone, so I’ll be elliptical: the last character to die is an innocent, whose death is arranged for (though not carried out by) the hero.
The Bible had Abraham about to kill his only child. He didn’t, but he did intend to, and this intention was what caused God to stay Abraham’s hand.
Also in the Bible, while it wasn’t a killing of the innocents, Lot did offer his two teenage virgin daughters up to be gang-raped by the whole village of Sodom, merely to protect two travelers.
I don’t think “Of Mice and Men” counts. I mean, Lenny isn’t innocent. He may not have malice of intent, but he is guilty. The killing is a mercy killing, but that’s not the same thing as killing someone to advance some other need.
In the novel Challengers Hope, by David Feintuch, Captain Nicholas Seafort’s spaceship is left adrift after being attacked by an alien that has evolved to live in hyperspace. While his civilian passengers engage in hopeless attempts to repair the ship’s engines, they come under more and more alien attacks, until Seafort realizes that the aliens are drawn to the “noise” their engine makes every time they try to restart it. The civilians refuse to stop tying to fix the engine, and barricade themselves in the engine room. Seafort gets them to unseal the door by promising, under his oath before God (Seafort is well known at this point for never, ever breaking his oath) not to harm them or prevent them from trying to fix the engine. As soon as the civilian ringleader unseals the door, he shoots her in the head and has his crew take over the engine room and confine the civilians to quarters.
In Lois Bujold’s Shards of Honor, Admiral Aral Vorkosigan agrees, at the urging of his emperor, to participate in a plot to assassinate the emperor’s only son and heir. While the prince is a psychopath and sexual sadist, the plot to kill him involves staging an invasion of a neighboring planet that the emperor (and Aral) know though secret intelligence to be futile. The plan works, and the prince is killed, but thousands of innocent men and women on both sides of the conflict are sacrificed in the process.
Then we should include The Sand Pebbles as well (yes it was a book before it was a movie)
In 24, Jack Bauer intentionally kills an innocent CTU officer to comply with terrorist demands, in order to buy more time. The person being killed was basically OK with it, in the end [well, sorta]. In retrospect, this was probably the most interesting moral dilemma in the entire series.
Off by six, Skald
As a broad generalization, any war novel where the good guys carpet bomb cities.
How about reality? General Sherman ordered a prisoner shot as a warning and threat to Confederates not to mine the roads in front of his troops during the March to the Sea. I believe the poor bastard was picked by lot, and while it’s arguable how innocent a soldier is, he had nothing to do with the “crime” he was punished for, and everyone knew it.
In his Safehold series David Weber has some of the Good Guys fall into the hands of The Inquisition, who use typical Inquisition tactics to torture ‘confessions’ out of them. In one scene, the captain, who has been tortured himself has his midshipman thrown into the cell with him as a psychological ploy. The midshipman has been turned into a complete wreck, with the usual indignities visited upon him, and is trying to apologize to his captain for breaking under the strain. The captain, tells him he has nothing to apologize for and deliberately kills the boy by breaking his neck.
I’m not sure if that qualifies, since the captain had the intent to spare his subordinate any more agony, but he definitely is presented as a hero, and he definitely makes a conscious decision to kill the midshipman.
(Also, I’m aware that Weber may or may not be considered good literature, but I enjoy his work, even if he does tend to belabor some points. And belabor them again. And again. And…well, you get the idea.)
Can anyone corroborate Chronos’ example of Last of the Mohicans? I read the book just a couple of years ago, and don’t remember anything like that. I also skimmed the Gutenberg text (looking for every instance of the word ‘burn’ - admittedly, not foolproof), and read through the wikipedia plot summary, and there’s nothing close to that.
Interesting topic, btw, Skald.
Of course, there are instances of heroes killing *themselves *in the service of a greater good - that is killing someone, but not what you meant.
You’ve never seen the movie?
No.
It might not qualify as heroes and innocents but there’s The Book of Skulls by Robert Silverberg. The plot of the novel is there’s a magic ritual that grants immortality. The ritual requires four people to join - two of them become immortal, one of them must commit suicide, and one of them must be murdered by the two survivors.
Lucky Number Slevin
While Slevin is not heroic, he is the guy we root for in this tale of revenge.
Mr Goodkat kills Nick in the opening scene, only because “you can’t have a Kansas City Shuffle without a body”. Nick was killed so that Slevin could be mistaken for Nick in order to close to the Boss and the Rabbi
I’m sure there are other examples in Shakespeare, but Romeo and Juliet also comes to mind. Romeo kills Paris near the end of the play, when Paris interrupts him at Juliet’s tomb. Paris believes that Juliet died of grief over the death of her cousin Tybalt at Romeo’s hands, and that Romeo has come to “do some villainous shame to the dead bodies”. He attempts to apprehend Romeo and is killed in the ensuing fight.
Romeo does attempt to warn Paris away first and clearly would have preferred to avoid the fight, but Paris is innocent and (even setting aside the misunderstanding about Romeo’s reasons for coming to the tomb) is acting lawfully when he attempts to capture Romeo. The Prince sent Romeo into exile after he killed Tybalt, and said that he would be executed if he ever returned to Verona. Since Romeo has come to Juliet’s tomb to commit suicide, his fight with Paris isn’t even a fight to save his own life. It’s only a fight to ensure that Romeo has the freedom to die in his preferred manner.
Um, I just read Turncoat (book 11) today. Should I stop now?
In World War Z, the “South African Plan,” while not perpetrated by a real “hero” of the book, is nonetheless considered to have saved millions. It involves sacrificing thousands of innocents to keep the undead occupied. The man who came up with the plan went mad afterward, presumably due to the monstrous nature of it.
Likewise, wasn’t Odysseus the original Between-Scylla-And-Charybdis guy, sacrificing some of the men under his command to avoid losing all? (Not to mention reluctantly but lethally silencing panicky Anticlus before he could give away their position inside the Trojan Horse.) Plus, consider the fate of Palamedes.
Ah, but said claimant was by no means an innocent. Sir Nigel Irvine was a man of honor who would never have set an innocent man up to be assassinated. Only after it was learned that Prince Semyon was known to…gasp…cheat at backgammon was he deemed expendable…obviously a blackguard & scoundrel who probably deserved to be shot anyway.
These subtle little bits of dark humor are one reason I enjoy Forsythe’s stories so much.
SS
Taking the thread title literally, if a conscious decision is what matters then in the David Weber short story The Service of the Sword, Sergeant Gutierrez fully intended to kill Midshipwoman Abigail Hearns when the pirates they were fighting overran them, to ensure they didn’t have a live prisoner to brutalize and kill themselves.