On Killing Your Characters

While finishing a manuscript revision, I’ve wondered about a significant aspect of the creation and revision of this story: The killing of main characters.

Just about any author you can think of has done this, in one tale or another. Entire novels hinge on a character’s death. Or, as I was once told in graduate school, “If you can’t think of a way to start the plot, kill someone.”

Does this god-like act require any kind of ethics? At the very least, shouldn’t it always be well done?

Without giving away any details, I can say that the prominent deaths in STW occur by accident combined with negligence. That’s not as sensational as outright murder, but it is part of an overall point of this novel: that the mundane can lead straight to the terrible. I have wondered, however, if these portrayals of death occur with sufficient caring for the character.

But how do you “care” for a character? I suppose that depends on how prominent a character is. The main characters get a lot of care (measured crudely by word count) while minor characters get less care — and, often, less fanfare in death.

Quantity of characters also affects caring. Multitudinous minor characters die in droves. At least 5,700 soldiers (and more than 3,000 horses) died at The Battle of Gettysburg; Michael Shaara presents them all for The Killer Angels but places a crucial fraction center stage. The combat sequences of World War Z require lots of humans and zombified humans to die like flies, no names, no histories.

What if the must-die character is an intentionally hateful, spiteful person whose death is intended to be a huge allegorical payoff for the reader? One thinks at the end of Moby Dick*, “Yes, whale — take that grim bastard with you.” But it was the extensive presence, even dominance, of Ahab during the bulk of the novel that makes the ending pay off. In a strange way, Melville had to care for this tyrant — he had to make him real and human enough that the reader comprehends all the pathos in his death.

What about comical death — does that undercut any sense of authorial caring? The plot of British novelist Magnus Mill’s The Restraint of Beasts hinges on the cover-up of several utterly random, Monty-Pythonesque deaths. Mill’s victims had to die to help prove his overall point, but he does let them die in ways that are meant to elicit guffaws.

Then we have death that seizes upon the reader’s baser instincts and demands their examination. One of my favorite snake-related short stories is Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat,” in which a long-suffering housewife allows a rattlesnake to. . .well, I won’t give it away. Suffice it to say that she probably commits murder by serpent, freeing herself, and the reader is left struggling with the story’s amoral pinch.

So, here are the Four Forms for Killing Characters:

1. Killing necessary to illustrate or make the moral of the tale: “Pantaloon in Black” from Go Down, Moses. The Quiet American.

2. Killing that is essential to the progress of the plot, or that is the result of a major motivation for a key character: Hamlet killing Polonius. James Bond hunting his wife’s killer in You Only Live Twice (she dies in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service).

3. In context, historically understandable or historically accurate killing necessary to plot: The Cold 6,000. For Whom the Bell Tolls.

4. A portrayal of killing that is not a hindrance to narrative effectiveness; i.e., killing that does not spoil verisimilitude, or undercut the desire nature of the drama: In other words, don’t do something stupid that is not in keeping with the tone, style, reality, and vocabulary of the tale (you’re in charge, remember; you’re killing people so do it right).

Inevitably, these forms (rules?) cannot cover everything, but valuable characters must have a valuable death.

*I’m waiting for an inevitable remake of Moby Dick in which a ragin’ MD destroys an entire fleet of Japanese whalers while everyone in the movie theater pumps their fists, shouting, “Dick! Dick! Dick! Dick!” (We already have a nuke-sub update of Melville’s novel to enjoy.)

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