Suicide

When I think about suicide in literature I immediately think Dostoevsky.

SPOILER ALERT








Mainly I think of Smerdyakov and Svidrigalov. Which leads me to believe that the act of suicide is the most selfish act imaginable (at least in Smerdyakov's case).

But then I think of Romeo and Juliet.

And Othello.

Now I don't know what to think about suicide. But all of those characters provide good case studies.

i have encountered suicide in brave new world, by huxley.
i think in this instance, and i suspect in many others, the act of suicide is seen as the final straw, or the final defiance that can be conjured by a character.
in terms of the 'hounourable' suicide such as Japanese seppuku (spealt right?) it is seen more as a way of eliminating the acts of the person. therefore there is often a balance in most authors minds between these two; suicide as a rebellion and also as a submission.

suicide can also be loked at thematically and can be a general narrative rejection of events.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by JBI

Honestly, suicide for some people is a better alternative. The right and wrongs are irrelevnt, as suicide is a persons choice, and to some extent, it must be left up to them to decide whether or not they wish to die.

---

I completely agree.

It disturbs me that suicide is often glamourized in literature. How come the back of Hemmingway novels include in his little "bio blurb" the fact that he aced himself? I've never seen this on a Jack London book.

It's curious too that the origins of the Romantic Movement trace back to The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe, which is about love and suicide. The author himself later found the book distasteful and discouraged it's popularity. Napoleon himself considered it one of the greatest achievements in European literature. The novel gave birth to the first-recorded "copycat suicides", and was perhaps the most fashionable book in European history.

I find this all very unsettling.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by phoenix151

It disturbs me that suicide is often glamourized in literature. How come the back of Hemmingway novels include in his little "bio blurb" the fact that he aced himself? I've never seen this on a Jack London book.

It's curious too that the origins of the Romantic Movement trace back to The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe, which is about love and suicide. The author himself later found the book distasteful and discouraged it's popularity. Napoleon himself considered it one of the greatest achievements in European literature. The novel gave birth to the first-recorded "copycat suicides", and was perhaps the most fashionable book in European history.

I find this all very unsettling.

---

There are two sides of the spectrum really - my highschool English textbook featured bios of some of the major writers of world literature, and for Virginia Woolf, introducing her essay The Death of the Moth, the bio went on and talked about her publishing career, with a very dull "Virginia Woolf died in 1941". Talk about stupidity.