(Spoiler alert. I am going to kill off some characters today and tell you about it.)
By PJ Parrish
Some of you might know I have a thing for apocalyptic stories. For some odd reason, dystopic fiction really floats my Charon’s Ferry. Give me degraded societies, post-nuclear nilism, and weird games of survival over sunny utopianism any day.
Aside: I am really a nice person. I tend to side with the optimists. You’d even want to sit next to me at a boring wedding.
But this is just my thing. One of my favorite movies is On the Beach, which led me to hunt down a copy of Neil Shute’s excellent source novel. No one dies in On the Beach, but everyone is doomed. The novel quotes these infamous lines from T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men: “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.”
I also liked Suzanne Collins’ books and count The Road among my all-time favorite novels. So when we started watching the TV series, The Last Of Us, I was all in for the long haul. The Last Of Us unfolds 20 years after the world is ravaged by a fungal pandemic that transforms humans into aggressive zombies. The hero Joel is a hardened smuggler, haunted by past loss, who is tasked with escorting Ellie, a 14-year-old girl immune to the infection, across the remnants of the US because she might be the key to a cure. They make their grim way from the ruins of Boston to the Montana wastelands, dodging zombies, renegades and what’s left of a foul government force. Think The Road meets Night of the Living Dead.
It’s really grim, yet strangely life-affirming, focusing on the prickly relationship between Joel and Ellie, and the drama’s main theme of human duality — our equal capacity for love and violence.
But then Joel dies. Not just dies by zombie attack. He is brutally murdered by rogue survivalists. I was crushed. I was so emotionally invested in this character that I almost didn’t want to watch the series anymore. A week later, it still haunts me.
Why kill off a good character? What’s to be gained? In The Road, Cormac McCarthy choses to kill off the father, who is leading his young son through the bleak post-nuclear world. But I sensed it had to end that way. The boy is taken in by a man and woman and the book’s elegiac ending is oddly optimistic:
She [the woman survivor] would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
I felt none of that sense of faith or higher purpose in Joel’s death. I felt only anger at the banal barbarity of it. I’m trying to process this as a writer. Sometimes, good characters have to be sacrificed. I get that. I’ve done it myself.
But killing off a character should always be done with the greatest of care. When done well, it makes us empathize with the extreme emotions characters are feeling. More to the point, it can — should? — provide momentum for the surviving characters. In the case of The Last Of Us, I can see where things are going to go. Joel’s death will spur Ellie to seek vengeance. But somehow it also seems a little cheap, done only by the writers to make me wonder, “What comes next?”
Killing off the good should never be only done as a plot tease. It must have purpose. I’m going to let someone else speak to this. Quoting novelist Karen Outen here, my emphasis in bold:
Killing off a fully realized character tests a story in a way unlike any other. It draws attention to itself, but the writer has to ask: does it draw energy away from or toward the story? Some deaths can render the story superfluous by contrast, or simply suck all the remaining energy out of a story. At its best, a character’s death should arrest some lines of story movement but create clearer narrative paths—ones of heightened tension—for other parts of the story.
I see death acting as a pinball lever, shooting a story from one path onto another and opening a new world of consequences for the characters and for the story arc. That new thrust can be as exciting for the reader as for the writer, carrying along with it a dizzying array of emotional realities: regret, relief, hubris, grief, joy, fear. The basic question about whether to kill off a character, then, is no different than the question about any narrative choice: does it work?
Does the death draw energy toward or away from the story? Is the death well earned? Does it propel the story via another character’s arc? Does it work? That’s the bottom line. I am willing to give The Last Of One a little more time to prove to me that it does.
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Postscript: I am on vacation for the next two weeks. In Paris, by the time you read this, taking in the sights, sounds and the insouciant house red. The world spins on. So please talk amongst yourselves and I will catch up soon. Bonne journée!
Hape you’re having a terrific time in Paris, Kris.
On the Beach still brings a lump to my throat no matter how many times I see Gregory Peck sail away in the sub while Ava Gardner waves from the dock.
I’m sick of shows where the only reason for deaths is an excuse for explosions, blood geysers, and gruesome special effects.
Death truly shifts the world on its axis. Karen Outen’s analogy of a pinball lever that changes the course of the lives is excellent and apt.
In one of my books, I killed two really decent characters and mourned them b/c they sacrificed themselves doing the right thing. Their deaths meant something. I guess that’s a somewhat universal hope that one’s life meant something and made a difference.
John Donne’s “No Man Is an Island” comes to mind: “Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.”
On the Beach haunted me too for a quite a while after seeing it for the first time, Debbie. Your “No Man is an Island” quote is very apt, too.
CJ Box killed off a character I didn’t think deserved to die in The Highway. No spoilers. Years later, I don’t remember the character’s name, or whether he was a returning character from another book, but I remember shouting “NO!” when it happened.
I sat in an airport & sobbed when Dana Stabenow killed off the Jack, the love of Kate Shugak’s life. Kate’s keening still haunts me. The death allowed a new exploration of Kate’s interior struggles to relate to others and new relationships. But I still mourn Jack. I bawled when Karen Ball killed off first Sheriff Dan Justice’s wife, then his two kids. There was a point to it (faith in God even in the worst of trials), but I was sorry I read it and would’ve stopped except for the hope that somehow the story could be redeemed. I’m the same with TV shows. If I’d known what Taylor Sheridan meant to do with his main character/narrator in the end, I would never have watched 1883. Not to mention what he did with Sam Elliott’s character. (He has a habit of doing it. Don’t watch 1923 if you feel the same way I do.) Sometimes enough is enough, and we should reward readers and viewers with a bit of hope for the future. Especially these days.
Jack’s death p*ssed me off. I felt like the author wasn’t happy with Kate’s gradual softening as well as the dreaded “it’s becoming a romance” that some female writers despise with their whole being. Jack’s death was a book reset and turned Kate back into the character in the first book. And to top it off, another character became the male love interest after that so the softening could begin again.
Killing a major character needs to be handled with care. I really liked Karen Outen’s quote and the questions you listed. One of the issues for me with Game of the Thrones was the sheer number of character deaths, especially the red wedding. The first few deaths served the story, steeped as it was in deadly political struggles for dominance, but as they continued it became repetitive and sucked energy out of the story.
I had a surprising character death occur in my first published novel which jolted readers, but which, I feel, very much drew energy toward the story as Mathilda realized the stakes of her task, and just how ruthless the villain was.
Hope you have a wonderful time in Paris, Kris!
I never read GAME OF THRONES for that reason. The casual murder of characters, just for fun, disgusts me.
I once killed off a beloved supporting character. My writing group had a fit. The story was, in the words of Dr. Who, a timey-wimey tale, and the self-sacrifice of the main character at the end would bring back those who were lost during the story, including the beloved supporting character, so I felt justified in creating temporary discomfort for the readers which showed just how bad the situation was.
It’s possible Joel was cut for a reason as unrelated to the story as his filming schedule on other projects. Personally, I hate it when a series kills off a likable main character. The expendable ensigns have sealed fates as soon as they pull on their red shirts, but I don’t want it for my favorite characters.
Do you feel it’s just as bad when a favorite character is unexpectedly transformed into a villain? I’m talking about longstanding characters you really trust in a series—not the ones for which you have a feeling that something is off. I don’t mind if it’s a temporary situation, but if it isn’t, I’m thinking I’d rather have a trusted character killed off entirely than abruptly sentenced to permanent villainy.
Yes, turning someone from enemy to foe is as hard to excuse as killing them off. See my remarks downthread on Gro.
I read On the Beach years ago, and it had an enormous impact. I had forgotten that no-one actually dies in the story, but all are doomed.
I killed off a character by apparent suicide in Lacey’s Star, but I think it served the story. When a group of people get together after the small funeral, they inadvertently reveal clues to another murder, one that had happened forty years earlier, that results in identifying the killer of both.
Romance writers have a saying. “Never kill off a perfectly good hunk.” It not only p*sses off the readers, but many want a story about them so you’ve tossed away a book with guaranteed readers. Not a good thing.
There’s also fridging, a term that means you kill off a woman just to give some guy a reason to do something. It’s demeaning as heck, and readers don’t like it.
I loved The Worm Ouroboros, a high fantasy novel written by E. R. Eddison in 1922. I was horrified when Eddison turned Lord Gro against his friends and allies. He was one of my favorite characters. First, Eddison wrote something like: “Then, suddenly, Lord Gro went fey . . . !” Gro changes sides and becomes a pest before being unalived. It still bothers me. It seemed so capricious. Consarn you, Eddison!
I so agree. A favorite author killed off a character–a child– and I’ve never read one of her books again. I felt cheated because in the other books, the child was smart and wouldn’t do what the author had her do to set up her death.
I never like it when a favorite character is killed off, iit’s one reason I won’t read an author who is on the best seller lists everywhere–I know if I pick up one, a character i get really invested in is going to die and I have enough sadness in my life without having a character who has become like a friend to die.