Sophie and Nathan (Sophie’s Choice), K (Kokoro, こころ) and Henry Scobie (The Heart of the Matter), all commit suicide. And perhaps Ichiro (Ko-jin, 行人) too, though his future is not disclosed.
To me, the only case quite compelling is that of Sophie, a Nazi concentration camp survivor. Other characters’ resolve is not so easily fathomable. It seems they carried it out so soon after the notion of it came to them. (Nathan of course influenced, and was influenced by, Sophie.) While death is inevitable to every human, thus an important subject to be explored in novels, isn’t it treated so lightly?
As Andrew Solomon says, suicide requires the wish to die, to kill and to be killed. This is a powerful combination extremely hard to act on even for a depressive.
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