[This message has been edited by Natosis (edited November 25, 2005).]
Maybe you could clarify your question a bit, and you would get a more decisive answer?
Actually, this is a great question for character development. Imagine your character. What is the most important thing to him? What things define his self-identity? What would happen to him if he lost them? What are the things that he lives for, and what would be so bad that it could overrule those things to the point of death?
One example that comes to mind is Anna Karenina (touted as quite possibly the best novel of our times, though I think it's crud). If you can stand to get through the entire thing, you will see how a good person is led down down down until there's no other way (in that character's mind). In fact, that's how Tolstoy got the idea. A well-to-do person had thrown themself under a train near Tolstoy's home, leading him to wonder what events could have led up to that. The result? A really long book. I recommend the book on tape over several months of commuting to work - it's easier to swallow if someone else is reading it instead of you.
Depression kills, it makes people do odd things, like suicide. I got depressed enough that I was going to go to the schools toilets and slit my wrists. I felt like hell, I didnt want to be part of a world that didn't know me, I wanted to be alone and ending my life was the one thing that could release me and be alone. Obviously I didn't do it, but i was about a 5 minute walk away from doing it... a person came to me and asked me to come with her. We talked, well she did, and I grunted my disapproval of stuff. She said she liked me, which filled me with warmth, something I didn't know about at that time. Soon she became a friend and I haven't turned back.
Just saying the commiting suicide depends on the individual. For me, it was a multiple of things: starting at a new school, my dad being sent away for the beginning of the Iraq war, me just not caring for life. It feels horrible, but if you can get out of it, then you feel unstoppable and I still do feel like that even 2 years and 11 months later.
Why is it important [to the story] that the MC wishes to kill himself?
In other words, what does the story gain from it?
* "Life is just too awful." This might be from physical pain, or emotional suffering. It might even be brought on by a drug imbalance.
* Shame. Either public shame (as when an imperial Japanese committed seppuku, to take blame), or private shame.
* To avoid some awful inevitability.
* In hopes it will fail and the attempt will change circumstances somehow
There are four general types of suicide that I can think of. The first, possibly more common, is the scream for attention. Frequently the suicidal person doesn't really want to die; she's just convinced herself that she does, because she secretly feels that it will make people respect her suffering or give her the attention she thinks she needs. Frequently they don't succeed, or don't believe they will succeed, or simply haven't thought it through that far. Very reckless, dramatic behavior - driving too fast, drinking too much, picking fights - is often attached to this style of suicidal; they'll claim they don't care if they die, but it's closer to the truth that they don't believe they can die. Or, possibly, that they're desperate enough for love and understanding that the risk of dying seems an acceptable one.
The second type of suicidal involves a very deep, grinding depression. Large things - the loss of a loved one, the loss of a job - may contribute, but it's usually the simple day-to-day grind that kills. Such people often feel utterly alone and unloved, defeated by their circumstances, shamed, trapped, desperate. They may have made a mistake that looms large in their minds, so large that they simply can't face the consequences: the wake of suicides after Black Friday is a good example here. They may be living a life that grinds on their souls to the point where dying seems simply a release from pain. Usually we're talking about a very deep-rooted pain or fear; either circumstances that have been with them for a long time, or circumstances that they have devoted their whole lives to avoiding (see, again, the Black Friday businessmen.)
The third and fourth are people with terminal diseases or the like and people in a situation where their self-sacrifice will save other people's lives, but I assume that's not what you're aiming for.
Anyway, typically when a person commits suicide it's because they've gotten to a point in their mind where whatever awaits them after death cannot possibly be worse than what they perceive their current life to be. That's broad and oversimplified, but if there isn't a sense of that you will probably fail to connect to the reader.
Within that, there are many specifics. wbriggs brought up a few good ones. Keep society in mind too. In Japanese culture, suicide is sometimes a matter of honor, or rather restoring it to the family.
Of course some people are going to be willing to commit suicide for something another person wouldn't be willing to go to that extreme over. I imagine that this is because some people see hope more clearly than others. A sense of hopelessness, of a situation without release or end, is very often a good way to go, but even more than the situation is the person. I've been pretty depressed in my life, especially a few years ago when I found myself unemployed, jilted, and living in a strange city with no friends...but I clung to the hope that things could get better and through that hope I made them better. Others might have just given in and taken the "easy route."
Which brings me to my last point about suicide...it is often difficult to generate sympathy for the character who commits suicide. The character who has a depressing situation but has the strength and courage to survive is usually more compelling.
[This message has been edited by Spaceman (edited November 26, 2005).]
He could then be shown that life does go on and people would miss him in thier own way.
I'm just saying, it's up to you how you work your story, but there are alternatives.
Sorry, but that's one thing that just gets to me.
-Monolith-
Be cautious about trying to "pump" people who have experienced deep depression, just to research your story. It's not like describing what it's like to break an arm. Most people who suffer deep depression have suffered through some pretty ugly and agonizing personal experiences... drug and alcohol addiction, child abuse, domestic violence, PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). It is an incredibly intimate experience, and not one that most people would willingly share with a stranger, particularly for the sake of exploitation into a novel.
I suggest you research the topic by reading books written by survivors of the above experiences instead. And if you are fortunate enough to be graced by a friendship that is close enough to share this level of intimacy, be sure to ask their permission before integrating any of their personal pain into your public story.
[This message has been edited by Elan (edited November 27, 2005).]
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Which brings me to my last point about suicide...it is often difficult to generate sympathy for the character who commits suicide. The character who has a depressing situation but has the strength and courage to survive is usually more compelling.
Christine has a very good point, I think. There are some exceptions, IMHO. For example, I recently watched the movie The Sea Within. It's about a man who is a quadriplegic and wants help to commit suicide. Through the course of the movie, I felt deeply sympathetic for this character. It's probably the only successful story I've seen/read regarding a main character who commited suicide.
One is recently paralyzed. It happened early in the story, and he never tried again; I think it was there to show he was really suffering.
Another, an Agatha Christie. A woman is going to attempt suicide. A gov't agent gives her a proposal. You want to die; we have a suicide mission. You look somewhat like the wife of a missing scientist; she just died in an accident. Be her for us, and you'll probably get caught and killed, but your country needs you.
So it was a plot device. Christie may also have been working out something about her survival of a depression/breakdown.
if it is a supporting character then maybe the main character will struggle with the same question, especially if they have been through similar experiences.
The following may sound platitudinous, but that's never stopped me before.
Like Christine said, it's when it is more painful to live than to die. Physical, Mental, Spiritual, Social/emotional pain. They can all be excruciating. Sometimes it can be about taking back the dignity that a life of pain has robbed from you.
But also, feeling too much and not feeling anything can be equally distressing. The feel of not feeling.
I knew a mother who had cared for her severly brain-injured son for so long that when he died she attempted suicide by throwing herself under a bus, even though her other kids were still alive. She survived the attempt, but what had happened? She felt inivisible, numb as a ghost, without a self.
Edit: Don't know if that helps.
By the way, when I looked at the forum the first two threads were:
suicide
is it worth it
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[This message has been edited by hoptoad (edited November 27, 2005).]
I also had a MC in one of my novels try to commit suicide, and then I changed my mind about it, because writing about it made me uncomfy.
Her motives were simple, she was a gymnast on the road to discovering her dreams, but the one person she wanted to pay attention to her would not. She was desperate and felt that she was worthless because her mother didn't support her activity in the sport, and it seemed that no matter what the MC did, her mother always had a put down for her.
I saw this in the news and I thought I'd post it because it's relevant: Heiress to Samsung fortune commits suicide
What was her motivation?
[This message has been edited by sojoyful (edited November 28, 2005).]
And I liked Anna Karenina, by the way. Half of it is from her point of view and the other have from another character who knows all the people she knows, but the two main characters only meet once in the whole book. If you only latch onto her suicide, yeah, it would suck. But his path is a different one.
I guess since I'm under my pen name here, I can say that I was suicidal for much of my teen years. One day I set my VCR wrong and missed a TV show I really wanted to watch and felt like killing myself over that. The reasons got less trivial as I grew older. Right after my first baby died I thought about it quite a bit, most seriously when they put me on some meds and one of them caused me to shake involuntarily. Then a few years later when we were in some financial difficulties. I think I just have an evil spirit that possessed me from time to time, that I couldn't distinguish from my own thought processes, if you want the God's honest truth. Or you could explain it as a biochemical bottleneck between my limbic node and my prefrontal cortex that could only be "broken through" with extreme emotional crisis.
I have improved much through 12 step work improving my emotional processing and spiritual basis.
[This message has been edited by franc li (edited November 28, 2005).]
sam...
For instance, one story I've been contemplating recently begins with a character undertaking a proceedure that almost requires the person to be suicidal. In fact, it is a form of suicide, but the story is about transitioning to something else. So it isn't about suicide, but it's important to understand what things would cause a character to be in such a state to volunteer for this proceedure.
I'm glad for this thread, because it is of great interest to me in preparing for that story. In a way, it's like the classic idea of creating conflict-- I call it throwing stones at the main character-- only in this case, I have to have thrown as many big ugly stones as I can in the past, as well as throw them in the future. Poor guy.
quote:You killed him? You prevented him from ever doing something like that again? Or did you hit him? Sorry to pry, it just isn't clear.
I got him, may of had charges pressed against me, but it was worth it in a moral sense.
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It's hard for me to answer a question like that, because I'm incapable of committing suicide in any conventional sense.
But, if he ever does kill himself, I'm told that he'll document the experience on Hatrack within two weeks of the event.
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Cali, I'm so sorry about your brother.
Thanks Sojoyful. It's taken a while to accept that I could not have stopped him, and that there is no guilt.
What it has given me is a point of referance for future writings, and if and when I ever have a character face this option then the book will be dedicated to my brother and his family.