Writers are gods. They create worlds, decide on their geographies, populate them with people and other animals, and decide how the lives of those people and other animals are going to pan out. Above all, they have the ultimate power to kill them off whenever they want.
I have often wondered how they feel about ending their lives, these characters they have dreamt up and fleshed out and on whom they have bestowed families and progeny and friends and home mortgages.
Of course, it?s obvious that often the whole point of the story is the hero?s-or heroine?s-death. If Sidney Carton does not pretend to be Charles Darnay and go to the guillotine, A Tale Of Two Cities loses its raison d?etre. Othello needs to commit suicide after murdering Desdemona. Graham Greene?s The End Of The Affair would be just another novel about an illicit sexual relationship if Sarah did not die. Her death turns the story into a woman?s journey from promiscuous housewife to saint. These stories need the protagonist to die.
Sometimes, the death completes the arc of the story and makes it a classic tragedy. Did Anna Karenina have to throw herself in front of a train? Someone writing Anna?s story today would perhaps have her leave her lover Vronsky and resolutely start a new life with her infant daughter.
It is poignant yet fitting in some sort of way that d?Artagnan is shot through the heart at the end of The Man In The Iron Mask the moment after he reads the letter informing him that he has been made marshall of France. We have seen the musketeer develop from a callow bucolic teenager to a general of the army, and it seems like one of those cosmic ironies that he dies as soon as he knows he has achieved the supreme honour of his life. Or, depending on which way your loyalty lies, you could believe this was the punishment Alexander Dumas meted out to his hero for putting his duty to the king above his 40-year-long friendship with Athos, Porthos and Aramis and causing the deaths of Athos and Porthos. Either way, d?Artagnan?s death is, well, logical.
Then there are works that are built around death, like Marquez?s spectacular novella Chronicle Of A Death Foretold. So too Tom Stoppard?s stunning play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which takes two minor characters from Hamlet and presents a hugely entertaining worm?s-eye view of a classical tragedy. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern stumble through a world of complete metaphysical chaos, which in physical terms exists in the wings of a performance of Hamlet. Stoppard imagines what happens when Hamlet exits the stage and enters another room in Elsinore Castle. And what goes on in that room after Hamlet exits that room (and this play) to enter the stage of Shakespeare?s play. The results are both hilarious, profound and mystifying.
What, however, I hate is the use of death merely to wring tears out of readers? eyes. After reading Dickens? Old Curiosity Shop, in which Dickens gives his child heroine a lingering death in prose deeply purple (?She was dead. Dear, gentle, patient, noble Nell was dead. Her little bird?a poor slight thing the pressure of a finger would have crushed?was stirring nimbly in its cage; and the strong heart of its child mistress was mute and motionless for ever.?), Oscar Wilde wrote: ?One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.?
The other example that comes to mind is JK Rowling. She kept warning that characters would begin to die from Harry Potter 4, and that a major character would cop it in HP5. In HP5, she then takes particular care to build up Sirius Black as the most attractive and empathetic figure in the book, emphasises repeatedly the deep bond between Harry and Black, and then delivers the coup de grace: Black dies in great pain.
This is cynical manipulation at its worst. In HP6, she does the same to Harry?s other father figure, Albus Dumbledore. There is enough speculation that she may kill off Harry in the last book of the series, and there has been nothing to indicate that Rowling is not heartless enough to do that. As the 11-year-old son of a colleague of mine told her: ?Mummy, JK Rowling is a cruel woman. She has never allowed Harry to be happy.?
Unhappiness makes more money than joy, and that?s an unfortunate aspect of our cultural proclivities. Even more unfortunate is the fact that talented and intelligent people take cynical advantage of this.