Go, Bid The Soldiers Shoot!

[poliphilo]

I killed off a character the other day. I hadn't seen it coming, but suddenly the logic of the story demanded a death. It was a character I was very fond of. I feel quite wistful about it.

But of course a created character can't really die, because it was never really alive. 

On the other hand it lives for as long as there is anyone reading about it.

To take an example that won't require me to post spoiler notices: Hamlet dies at the end of the play; does this mean that Hamlet is dead? Not really. Turn back a page or two and- look- he's alive again.  Is he any deader then than Horatio or Fortinbras or the other characters who survive him? Of course not. We speak of them all  in the present tense. 

And in one sense he's livelier than any of them-  livelier almost than any other character in fiction.

And why grieve, as we do, for his death when he'd be dead now anyway? Almost every character imagined to be living at a  time before the middle of the twentieth century would be dead now anyway. Elizabeth Bennet ends her story alive but would now be dead. Darcy would be dead, Jane Eyre would be dead, Mr Pickwick would be dead and so on and on and on.

Yet it's plainly absurd to think that way. They're all still alive. As alive as they ever were. They outlive their creators. They exist in a timeless present

And that includes characters who are imagined to live in the future. James Kirk is dead; we saw him die in a movie. Yet James Kirk hasn't even been born yet.  Pah! Much more of this and my head will start hurting.

And yet I'm still very sorry for  the little person I just killed.

Comments

[baritonejeff.livejournal.com]

Thanks for a wonderfully lucid detailing of the creative and re-creative processes.

[chochiyo-sama.livejournal.com]

WHAT???? How could you????

Heh heh heh

No, I know how you feel. I cry every time Hamlet "dies" as he is my favorite character in Shakespeare. In MacBeth (my favorite Shakespeare play) I always cry for the little son (of McDuff?) who is murdered as well. He was such a lively little character for his 5-6 lines of "life."

I will HATE JK Rowling forever and ever, though, if she kills Harry, Ron, Hermoine, or Hagrid. And I won't like her much if she lets ANY of the Weasleys die.

Grrr.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Cheers!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

JKR has said that she's dealing with real evil and if you're dealing with real evil people get killed- and it's not good enough to dispose of a few subordinate characters whom nobody cares about.

I know what she means. The demands of THE STORY over-ride ones affection for characters A, B and C.

I've been thinking of Dumas recently (maybe because Purchas is now trespassing on the territory of the 3 Musketeers) and how at the end of The Man In The Iron Mask he kills off Athos, Porthos and D'Artagnan one by one- and how painful it is, but how right!

[chochiyo-sama.livejournal.com]

Now for a serious moment (usually rare for me):

All due respect, I have to disagree about Rowling. HP is a children's story--a generation of children will be scarred if she murders Harry or the other kids. Real life is icky enough without their little heroes being gutted before their eyes.

Dumas wrote for adults.

I don't think it is ever appropriate for evil to win in a children's story.

The kids have to have hope.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I'm remembering a story I heard about Thackeray, who while writing Vanity Fair came out of his study with tears running down his face and announced: "I've just killed [--] !"

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Stephen King apparently wrote Rowling and begged her not to kill off Harry.

[manfalling.livejournal.com]

i agree with you, and with rowling on this dad. evil is evil. and if you think kids can't take real evil, look at the never ending story.

artax, the horse, dies. in the swamps of sadness. god, did i bawl and cry every time i saw that as a kid.

"ARTAX! FIGHT THE SADNESS!"

but the horse still dies. i used to wish so hard that he didn't. but he does. so do the little people, the guy with the racing snail, and the bat guy. the nothing comes THIS close to destroying everything.

and that's what makes victory so sweet, in the end. but also bittersweet. and that's what makes that movie one of my all time favourites, ever.

no way will voldemort win. but yes, harry may die.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I think it's about truth. Emotional truth and artistic truth. Sometimes a storyteller has to do stuff he/she doesn't want to do because not to do it would be to sin against truth.

My Artax moment is in Kipling's Jungle Book- where Akela the lone wolf dies in the fight against the Red Dog. It's unbearably sad (or it was when I was nine or ten) but it's also true.

Another Artax moment is when Christopher Robin goes away to school at the end of the Pooh stories. It amounts to killing all the characters off. So many classic children's stories end with a dying fall- and so they should because childhood is a transitory state.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I've had to go away and think about this.

In the end I think you have to trust an author to get it right. manfalling writes (above) about the Never-Ending Story and how almost everyone in that story winds up dead. Victory is won in the end, but at a terrible cost.

I think children can take it.

Context is all. If JKR kills off her characters frivolously or because she's gotten bored with them, then it will feel wrong. But if they die nobly, heroically, fittingly, then along with the sadness there will be a kind of triumph. Good people do die- and sometimes it's the manner of their dying that confirms their virtue.

I remember hating it when Porthos got killed at the end of the Man In The Iron Mask. But it was a good death and worthy of him and better that he should go out like that than linger on ingloriously and die of old age.

But we mustn't anticipate. We don't know JKR's intentions. Maybe it won't be as bad as we've been led to believe.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I, personally, think it would be wrong to kill Harry. it's a very radical act to kill your pov character. but, who knows, she may be able to justify it artistically.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I can believe it. One becomes very attached to the funny little creatures of one's fancy.