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Which character deaths made you cry?

topic posted Tue, September 20, 2005 - 9:07 AM by  Spanker
My top few are (warning some spoilers):
Beth in Little Women
Dumbledore in the The Half-Blood Prince
The anti-hero in A Tale of Two Cities
Lenny in Of Mice and Men
Charlotte in Charlotte's Web
Dora in Time Enough for Love
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Spanker
offline Spanker
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  • Tyler
    Tyler
    offline 22

    Re: Which character deaths made you cry?

    Tue, September 20, 2005 - 12:11 PM
    I guess those Victorian novels really get to me. Tess, in "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," and Maggie in "The Mill on the Floss" are both pretty heartbreaking.

    Oh yes, and my high school favorite: Phineas in "A Separate Peace."
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    • Sady
      Sady
      offline 22

      Re: Which character deaths made you cry?

      Tue, September 20, 2005 - 12:14 PM
      I agree with you on Tess. Actually, Tess got to me all the way through. It was a very tearful book. Also, Anais Nin's diary entries on her death, which she wrote on her deathbed, always get to me.
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      • cece
        cece
        offline 222

        Re: Which character deaths made you cry?

        Tue, September 20, 2005 - 12:19 PM
        The death of the Jude's children in "Jude the Obscure" was heart-rending to me. That was truly tragic.
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        • Tyler
          Tyler
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          Re: Which character deaths made you cry?

          Tue, September 20, 2005 - 12:27 PM
          I totally forgot about that. Ugh. I believe that the page before that scene, I thought: "things could not be any worse." I was wrong.
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          • cece
            cece
            offline 222

            Re: Which character deaths made you cry?

            Tue, September 20, 2005 - 12:33 PM
            yah. i totally questioned the value of "honesty for honesty's sake" after i read that. after reading that book, i concluded that thomas hardy did not like women. his female characters were always lacking.
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            • Tyler
              Tyler
              offline 22

              Re: Which character deaths made you cry?

              Tue, September 20, 2005 - 4:02 PM
              "i concluded that thomas hardy did not like women. his female characters were always lacking."

              Hmm. I guess he probably harbored some bitterness. But I figure that a serious, flawed female character is more of a demonstration of respect than an empty, perfect, hot-house beauty. I'd rather know Tess than some other vapid victorian bubble.
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              • cece
                cece
                offline 222

                Re: Which character deaths made you cry?

                Tue, September 20, 2005 - 4:11 PM
                i just wanted to see him write stronger female characters. tess was a victim. bathsheba everdeen and the women from the "the return of the native" and "the mayor of castlebridge" were all opportunists; the woman in jude the obscure was honest to fault (hence the children's death); and i think the woman from "a pair of blue eyes" was sort of like tess as well. i just wanted him to write one strong female character because they DID exist i victorian times.
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                • Miss...
                  Miss Gillian
                  offline 27

                  Re: Which character deaths made you cry?

                  Tue, September 20, 2005 - 5:51 PM
                  Beth in Little Women.
                  Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities.
                  Jim Casy in Grapes of Wrath.

                  I think I cried the entire way through Jude. It was just so horrible.

                  I know she doesn't die, but the scene when Kitty, from Anna Karenina, is giving birth and almost dies and Levinin prays to God to save her always makes me cry.
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                • Tyler
                  Tyler
                  offline 22

                  Re: the thomas hardy aside... sorry

                  Tue, September 20, 2005 - 6:03 PM
                  You are right, they did exist. Didn't Jude suffer from the same sort of weakness? Hardy seems to love giving his characters a single, overdeveloped virtue, and then takes sadistic pleasure in using it to destroy them. It's fascinating, and I hope a little dishonest. I hate thinking that goodness will ultimately screw you over. Anyway, I guess I still think that weakness was not exactly the problem. Perhaps a somewhat misshapen morality made his characters more vulnerable. You know, like have one leg significantly longer than the other.
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                    cece
                    cece
                    offline 222

                    Re: the thomas hardy aside... sorry

                    Tue, September 20, 2005 - 6:10 PM
                    oh i don't have any quarrel with flawed characters. it's just that they overtly and offensively flawed characters in his novels were consistently women. they were either weaklings or opportunists...no middle. the men seem to have a lot of virtue: angel clare, gabriel oak, jude... but the women?? don't get me wrong. i loved his novels, but it was just so consistent, this string of women with said character flaws. he didn't deviate.
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                    • Rock...
                      Rockstar
                      offline 329

                      Re:McMurphy as Christ

                      Wed, September 21, 2005 - 1:26 AM
                      Randle McMurphy in "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest.'

                      By the time Mac's wheeled into Big Nurse's ward for the last time, he's a lobotomized vegetable, a rotting exhibit of the power of the Combine. When Chief Bromden mercifully smothers him to death, part of Mac's spirit becomes his. Despite decades of passivity, the Chief finds ripping out the ward window and running to freedom easy, inevitable.

                      Death scenes in books don't affect me as much as a really perfect ending does. I just finished "A Confederacy of Dunces" for the second time and Ignatius Reilly's unlikely-but-inevitable deliverance at the finish still squeezes my heart.
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                      • Max
                        Max
                        offline 2

                        Re:McMurphy as Christ

                        Mon, April 28, 2008 - 4:53 AM
                        Ya, even after seeing the movie first that one hit pretty hard. mac is truly one of my heroes. I have theory that the town witch McMurphy grow up in is my home town but it could just as easily be any of the other crappy Oregon towns between the coast and Penelton.
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  • Mari...
    Marie Therese
    offline 61

    Re: Which character deaths made you cry?

    Mon, September 26, 2005 - 5:56 PM
    Andrei Bolkonski in Tolstoy's 'War and Peace'
    Rima in W.H. Hudson's 'Green Mansions' (it's been eons since I read this!)
    Erlend Nikulausson in Sigrid Undset's 'Kristin Lavransdatter' trilogy
    Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening'

    All of these were first read during my emotional early teen years. As an adult, I find I rarely cry over character deaths anymore, but am more likely to shed a tear over "living deaths"-lives blighted by indifference, cruelty, fear, longing, regret. Thomas Buddenbrooks' outwardly successful but inwardly dissatisfying and pathetically circumscribed life in Mann's classic novel 'Buddenbrooks' is far sadder than his eventual death; on first reading 'Ethan Frome' I remember fervently wishing Edith Wharton HAD killed off her characters; and the utterly hopeless but completely undramatic ending of Henry James' 'The Golden Bowl' provoked a sadness in me that lingered for weeks when last I read it. Fates worse than death to me, I guess...
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    • Unsu...
       

      Re: Which character deaths made you cry?

      Mon, September 26, 2005 - 10:47 PM
      I agree with Marie that my saddest momemts in literature are not necessarily linked to the physical death of a character.

      Lately, I've been thinking of Prince Myshkin from Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot." An innocent and truly good soul, Myshkin is annihilated by a vacuous society where his honest deeds and love are the accoutrements of idiocy. His end is another "living death."

      I'm can usually take my medicine, but I felt devasted when I finished this book.
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  • Max
    Max
    offline 2

    Re: Which character deaths made you cry?

    Mon, April 28, 2008 - 5:04 AM
    Susana in The Dark Tower, she didn't really die so much as give up at the finish line. I really felt abandoned, even after Jake and Eddy died that was the hardest part of the books. I never gave a rat's ass for Susan, wizard and glass suck so bad I couldn't feel anything for any one
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