Deaths: Unearned

28}POOR MARTHA, WE HARDLY KNEW YE:
DEATH AS DRAMA

Melodrama can be deadly—not just to our stories, but for our characters themselves.

In a story about an elderly spinster named Martha, we are presented with a series of nonevents leading up to her sudden “natural” death (she dies in her sleep). Martha’s death is meant to touch us deeply, and even to move us to tears. For some readers it might succeed.

But editors can be stony about such things. They don’t like to be manipulated. To prepare readers for the death of a major character takes a lot of development—more than a short story can deliver, usually—so the death feels inevitable and justified, and not like a ploy to force sympathy for an underdeveloped protagonist. ¹³

In this example, however, we barely know poor Martha before her creator bumps her off. And sad though it may be, a character’s natural death—or, for that matter, her accidental death—reveals little if anything about her. The emotional journey of a story in which the protagonist dies should be established by the protagonist herself, through acts other than dying. Give Martha some conflict: Put her in a situation that tests her spinsterhood or places it in high relief. Have her go on a date, or have a friend try and set her up, something that breaks the routine of her days.

In the story as written, Martha (a retired teacher) watches a high school football game. She eats popcorn and has a chat with a former student. This could be poignant, especially if we learn that the student had been a favorite of hers, or her least favorite, and that he has gone on to great success in the world of finance (or politics or art), while her own life dwindles to a spinster’s vigil. As written, however, the chat exists only to highlight Martha’s everyday loneliness.

Even in a photorealistic, slice-of-life story whose method consists of putting a character through her grim paces, each scene must be vivid and real, meaning that it takes place in a changing, not a static, world.

We need to care about Martha not just because she dies, but because she’s someone we have connected to and felt something for.¹⁴

29} SUICIDE: IN FICTION AS IN LIFE,
A LAST RESORT

No act in life is more intrinsically dramatic than suicide. In suicide, protagonist and antagonist are one; all of the emotions implied by that duality are bottled up in a single being and expressed by a singular action.

Shakespeare knew this: He hinged the plot of Hamlet, the greatest of all dramas, not on the question of vengeance, but on an even more vexing question: To be or not to be? But as with all explosive material, suicide must be handled with great care.

For example, a teenage girl watches, helplessly, uncomprehendingly, as the father she adores plunges into despair and resorts, finally, to suicide. Such a story obviously has great dramatic potential. And it happens that its author knows how to create character and mood and to write good dialogue.

Nevertheless, I have trouble with the father’s suicide. On one hand, I find it predictable; on the other I find it unconvincing. Suicide being the exception rather than the rule (otherwise there’d be bodies strewn everywhere), the onus is on the author to make the act seem not merely plausible, but inevitable.

In fiction as in life, suicide should be the last resort, taken only when all other options have been exhausted. Otherwise, even assuming that the action is justified and believable, we lose sympathy for the protagonist and define him mainly in terms of that one action.

Personally, I think the girl’s father would hold out longer. As despondent as he is over his wife’s death, and as uncomfortable as he is with retirement, unless he’s clinically depressed he might find some occupation. And assuming he’s bound to do himself in, a bottle of over-the-counter sleeping pills probably wouldn’t suffice, especially if his daughter finds him and rushes him to the hospital, as she does in this story.

In the interest of turning the story’s focus away from its sensational centerpiece, we might hear more about the daughter’s own life, and make her the focus of the action. She is finding herself while he loses himself, and she must struggle to make peace with a man she adored who ultimately abandons her in the worst of all possible ways.