List of suicides in fiction

This is a list of incidents of suicide — the intentional killing of oneself — depicted in fictional works, including movies, television series, anime and manga, comics, novels, etc.

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by expanding it with reliably sourced entries.

A

• Mona Aamons Monzano (Cat's Cradle), swallows ice-nine
• Adric (Doctor Who), blows up the spaceship he is in to save the Earth in Earthshock.
• Aegeus, a character from Greek mythology, drowns himself after mistakenly believing that his son Theseus was dead^[1]
• Ajax the Great, a character from the Greek mythology, stabs himself with a sword (his death is described by Sophocles, Pindar and Ovid; the suicide is, however only implied in Homer when, in the Odyssey, the ghost of Ajax refuses to speak to Odysseus in Hades)^[2]
• Alby (The Maze Runner), allows himself to be killed by Grievers.
• Misa Amane (Death Note), unknown cause. In the anime, she was last seen standing at the top of a very tall building; it is assumed that she jumped. In the manga it was suggested that she hanged herself.^[3]
• Anck-Su-Namun (The Mummy), stabs herself.
• Anna (The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez), poisons herself in guilt over Willoughby Smith's murder.
• Brigham Anderson (Advise and Consent), slits his throat.
• Antigone, a character from Greek mythology, hangs herself whilst awaiting execution.^[4]
• Arrack (Detective Conan), uses a poison capsule hidden in his teeth
• Alia Atreides (Dune), defenestration^[5]
• Leto Atreides, (Dune), poison gas capsule
• Axel (Kingdom Hearts), channeling all his power into the Eternal Flames for a suicide attack to clear Betwixt and Between of countless Dusks, dies (as a Nobody) from overexertion.

B

• Kittan Bachika (Gurren Lagann), uses his Gunman's King Kittan Giga Drill Break to destroy the Death Spiral Machine in a suicide attack, dying in the resulting explosion.
• Hannah Baker (Thirteen Reasons Why), swallowed a handful of pills
• Lily Bart (The House of Mirth), overdoses on chloral hydrate (possible suicide)
• John Barton (Looking for Alibrandi), overdoses on pills
• Judy Barton (Vertigo), after faking a suicide as Madeleine Elster, jumps from a mission tower after being startled by a nun.
• Massoud Behrani (House of Sand and Fog), suffocates himself
• Jacqueline de Bellefort (Death on the Nile), shoots herself after killing her lover Simon to escape justice
• Georg Bendemann (The Judgment), threw himself off a bridge^[6]
• Creighton Bernette (Treme) threw himself off a ferry in the first season episode "Wish Someone Would Care"
• Billy Bibbit (One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest), slits own throat
• John Billings (The Patriot), shoots himself
• Sarah Borden (The Prestige), hangs herself
• Emma Bovary (Madame Bovary), ingestion of arsenic.^[7]
• Norman Bowker (The Things They Carried), hangs himself
• Elizabeth Bradford (One False Move), jumping.
• Rick Brogan (Surviving: A Family in Crisis), suicide pact together with his girlfriend Lonnie inside a car (suffocation)
• Hecky Brown (The Front), jumps out of a window
• Richard Brown (The Hours), jumps out of a window
• Bill Buchanan (24), wrestles a gun from a Sangalan insurgent and ignites an explosion in the White House presidential bunker by shooting the gun in the gas-filled room, sacrificing himself and giving Jack Bauer a chance to rescue President Taylor.
• Lamar Burgess (Minority Report), shoots himself.
• Sammy Bushey (Under the Dome), shoots herself

C

• Nora Caldwell (Seconds Away), shoots herself in the head
• Calvados (Detective Conan), shoots himself in the head
• Howard W. Campbell Jr. (Mother Night), hangs himself
• Jericho Cane (End of Days), impales himself on a sword
• Juliet Capulet (Romeo and Juliet), stabbed herself upon discovering that Romeo Montague has poisoned himself.^[8]
• María Cardenal (Matador), shoots herself.
• Russell Casse (Independence Day), flys into a the beam of the alien destroyer in a suicide attack, dying from the resulting explosion.
• Castel (The Bourne Identity), defenestration
• Tom Chandler (The Bill), gunshot to the head
• Marjorie "Maude" Chardin (Harold and Maude), overdoses on pills
• Chloe (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), hanged herself after being convinced to by The First
• Cio-Cio-San (Madama Butterfly), seppuku;^[9] and Kim in the contemporary adaptation Miss Saigon (gunshot)^[10]
• Vera Claythorne (And Then There Were None), hung herself after going mad
• Mallorie "Mal" Cobb (Inception), jumping from heights^[11]
• Quentin Compson (The Sound and the Fury), drowning^[12]
• Richard Cory (Richard Cory), gunshot to the head^[13]
• Doug Coughlin (Cocktail, 1988 film) - slashes throat with a broken bottle
• Ch'u Sing (Romeo Must Die), shoots himself^[14]

D

• Max Da Costa (Elysium), a cyborg, knowingly tells his friend to activate a program that will kill him.
• Dagonet (King Arthur), breaks the ice-covered lake below him in a battle with an axe in a suicide attack, sacrificing himself so that Arthur and the rest of his party can escape to safety.
• Ken Daley (In Bruges), jumps from a bell tower.
• Nathan Dawkins (Beyond: Two Souls), commits suicide via self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head as a final act of reparation for the myriad of execrable misdeeds he committed during his own personal earthly existence, and to reunite with his deceased wife and daughter.
• Jason "J.D." Dean (Heathers), blows himself up
• Thelma Dickinson (Thelma & Louise), drives off Grand Canyon cliff side with Louise to escape arrest
• Martha Dobie (The Children's Hour), hangs herself.
• Carrie Dollanganger (Petals on the Wind), ingestion of arsenic-laced doughnuts
• Maya Driscoll (24), slit her wrists
• Dyne (Final Fantasy VII), jumps off a cliff

E

• Ed (What We Talk About When We Talk About Love), shoots himself in the mouth.
• Julian English (Appointment in Samarra), carbon monoxide in garage.
• Entei (Pokémon 3: The Movie), dies in a suicide attack on the Unown.

F

• Tarin Faroush (24), drives his car of the top level of a parking structure to his death.
• Felix the Cat, drinks gasoline after the love of his life announced that the two had kittens in the cartoon, Feline Follies.^[15]
• Ferro Lad (Legion of Super Heroes), real name Andrew Nolan, carries an Absorbatron bomb towards a Sun-Eater to destroy it in a suicide attack.
• Flying Snow (Hero) impales herself with her own sword after she accidentally but fatally stabs Broken Sword.
• William "D-Fens" Foster (Falling Down), suicide by cop
• Hal Francis (Blue Jasmine) hangs himself in prison.
• Tylendel Frelennye (Magic's Pawn), the life-bonded of Vanyel Ashkevron, jumps off a tower after being driven mad by the murder of his twin brother.^[16]
• Theodore Finch (All the Bright Places), drowns himself

G

• Hedda Gabler (Hedda Gabler), shoots herself offstage^[17]
• Royce Garrett (Vertical Limit), tells his son to cut the rope suspending him and falls to his death.
• Ghazan (The Legend of Korra), commits suicide by deliberately causing a cave-in in order to preclude him from inevitably returning to prison once again, and in an unsuccessful attempt to kill both Mako and Bolin.
• Maria Gibson (The Problem of Thor Bridge), fatally shoots herself and hides the evidence in the process to frame Grace Dunbar of murder.
• Edwin Gibbs (Darkest Fear), or Nathan Mostoni, commits suicide in prison.
• Seymour Glass ("A Perfect Day For Bananafish"), shoots himself
• Godric (True Blood/Southern Vampire Mysteries novels), "meets the sun", which as a vampire is fatal
• Sonny Grotowski (Monster's Ball), shoots himself.
• Gullberg (The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest), shoots himself after shooting Zalachenko

H

• Clu Haid (The Final Details), gunshot in the head.
• Violet Harmon (American Horror Story), intentional pill overdose.
• John Hartigan (Sin City), shoots himself.
• Kalil Hassan (24), drives his car into an oncoming cement truck.
• Brooks Hatlen (The Shawshank Redemption), hangs himself.
• Hatsumi (Norwegian Wood), hangs herself.
• Frank Hayden (Montana 1948), slashes wrists with broken glass.
• Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights), starves himself to be with his deceased love, Cathy.
• Grace Heke (Once Were Warriors), hangs herself.
• Kurt Hendricks (Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol), jumps to his death.
• Richard Hillman (Coronation Street), Tried to kill the Platt family by driving into a canal, but instead took his own life.
• Caledon Hockley (Titanic), shoots himself through the mouth.
• David Hoope (Death Note), shoots himself in the head.
• Peter Houghton (Nineteen Minutes), suffocates by stuffing a sock down his throat.
• Waring Hudsucker (The Hudsucker Proxy), jumps out the window of a skyscraper.
• Ray Huizanga (Cell), shoots himself.
• Malcolm Hume (Six Years), cyanide.

I

• Iván (Julia's Eyes), slits his own throat with a knife.
• Imhotep (The Mummy Returns), who is holding on for dear life from being dragged down into a pit to the underworld, willingly lets go when he sees that his lover has forsaken him.

J

• Javert (Les Misérables), jumps off bridge and drowns^[18]
• Young Joe (Looper), shoots himself.^[19]
• John the Savage (Brave New World) hangs himself^[20]
• Dayna Jurgens (The Stand), smashes her head through a glass window and thrashes her head around so that the sharp edges of the glass cut open her jugular vein.
• Joe Keller (All My Sons), shoots himself.
• Johnny (The Room), shoots himself.
• Joseph (Contact), a religious fanatic, blows himself up, destroying "the machine."
• Juxian (Farewell My Concubine), is found dead, method unknown.

K

• Anna Karenina (Anna Karenina), steps into the path of a train^[21]
• Father Damien Karras (The Exorcist), defenestration.
• Moritsugu Katsumoto (The Last Samurai), seppuku
• Joe Kelly (Sayonara), found dead beside Katsumi Kelly, most-likely swallows poison.
• Katsumi Kelly (Sayonara), found dead beside Joe Kelly, most-likely swallows poison.
• Kenji (Rush Hour 3) separates himself from Lee, falling to his death.
• Gabriel Kent (The Bill), jumps off the top of a building
• Jonathan Kent (Man of Steel), tells Clark to not save him when an incoming tornado sweeps him up to his death.
• Kim Yong-ho (Peppermint Candy), stands in front of a speeding train.
• Charles Kingshaw (I'm The King of the Castle), drowns himself.
• George Kirk (Star Trek), dies aboard the USS Kelvin in a suicide attack on the Narada.
• Kizuku (Norwegian Wood) inhales carbon monoxide from his father's car.
• Makoto Kobayashi (Colorful) overdoses on pills.
• Irina Komarov (A Good Day to Die Hard), dies after failed suicide attack.
• Matt Kowalski (Gravity), while in space, to prevent dragging Dr. Stone with him, detaches the cable attached to the back of his MMU that Stone is holding onto, presumably suffocating in the subsequent few minutes after detaching.
• Walt Kowalski (Gran Torino), intentionally provokes gang members to shoot him.
• Yoji Kuramuto (Battle Royale), in the film, hangs himself alongside his girlfriend Yoshimi Yahagi
• Lawrence Kutner (House), dies of a self-inflicted gunshot wound and is found in "Simple Explanation" by colleagues.^[22][23]

L

• Rolo Lamperouge (Code Geass), uses repeatedly his Geass in a suicide rescue to save Lelouch, dying from overexertion.
• Latios (Pokémon Heroes) uses all his psychic ability to save Altomare from an oncoming tsunami, dying (corporeally) from overexertion.
• Harold Lauder (The Stand), shoots himself in the head.
• Laura (The Orphanage), takes an overdose of sleeping pills^[24]
• Leonard "Gomer Pyle" Lawrence (Full Metal Jacket), self-inflicted gunshot wound after murdering his drill instructor.
• Lee Jin-pyo (City Hunter), suicide by secret service
• Lee Soo-ah (Oldboy), separates herself from her brother Woo-jin trying to pull her up, falling from a dam to her death.
• Lee Soo-hyeok (Joint Security Area), shoots himself in the mouth
• Lee Woo-jin (Oldboy), shoots himself in the head
• Myra Lester (Waterloo Bridge), walks into path of a moving truck.
• Hu Li (Rush Hour 2), unsuccessfully trying to kill Lee and Carter, blows herself up.
• Su Lin (Enter the Dragon), stabs herself with a shard of glass.
• Little Father Time (Jude the Obscure), hangs himself after murdering his siblings (in this case, his step-mother's two children)
• Lionel (Kind Hearts and Coronets), stabs himself with a dagger to escape his poverty.
• The five daughters of the Lisbon family, in Jeffrey Eugenides's novel, The Virgin Suicides. First, 13-year-old Cecilia tries and fails to kill herself by slitting her wrists. A few weeks later, she jumps from a second story window and dies, impaled on a fence-post. A year later, the remaining girls commit mass suicide in a variety of methods. Lux (15) dies of carbon monoxide poisoning; Bonnie (16) hangs herself; and Therese (18) overdoses on sleeping pills. Mary (17) attempts to kill herself by sticking her head in the oven, but lives for another month before ending her life with an overdose of sleeping pills.^[25]
• Willy Loman (Death of a Salesman), car crash^[26]
• Kevin Lomax (The Devil's Advocate), shoots himself to prevent being forced to create an heir, but is still alive after John Milton loops him back to the courthouse bathroom.
• Mary Ann Lomax (The Devil's Advocate), cuts her throat with the shards of a broken mirror.
• Lonnie (Surviving: A Family in Crisis), suicide pact together with her boyfriend Rick Brogan inside a car (suffocation)
• Ilse Lubin (Midnight's Children), drowns herself.

M

• Lady Macbeth (Macbeth), method unspecified, "Who, as 'tis thought, by self and violent hands took off her life"^[27]
• Prince Mamuwalde/Blacula - (Blacula), intentionally exposes himself to sunlight
• Benigno Martín (Talk to Her), half-believes that he can "escape" into a coma if he takes the right amount sleeping pills, but overdoses.
• Habib Marwan (24), while hanging from the upper floors of a parking structure, separates himself from a Jack Bauer who is trying to pull him up to safety, falling to his death.
• Bertha Mason (Jane Eyre), sets fire to Thornfield Hall and dies by jumping off the roof of the burning building.
• George Mason (24), who has no more than a few hours to live due to exposure to plutonium radiation, convinces Jack Bauer to let him finish flying a plane carrying a live nuclear warhead into the Mojave Desert, dying from the blast.
• Lt. Col. Matthew Andrew Markinson (A Few Good Men), shoots himself
• McWatt (Catch-22), flies his plane into a mountain
• Julia Milliken (24), shoots herself.
• Teru Mikami (Death Note), commits suicide in prison
• Naomi Misora (Death Note), commits suicide
• Romeo Montague (Romeo & Juliet), takes poison after finding Juliet whom he believed to be dead.^[28]
• Darren Mullet (Tormented), hangs himself
• Madotsuki (Yume Nikki), throws herself off her apartment balcony.
• "Papa" Monzano (Cat's Cradle), swallows ice-nine
• Tom Morgan (Eagle Eye), rams his car into a large piece of metal in a suicide attack.
• Jerome Morrow (Gattaca), sets himself on fire in the incinerator in his house
• Myron (Portrait of a Suicide), drives his car into a tree.
• M.C. (Cabaret) In the 1998 Revival, the M.C. is taken to a concentration camp where he throws himself onto the electric fence.

N

• Naoko (Norwegian Wood) commits suicide; her older sister also committed suicide before the action of the novel.
• Robert Neville (I Am Legend) takes cyanide pills to avoid brutal execution from his zombified captors.
• Samuel Norton (The Shawshank Redemption) shoots himself
• Newt (The Death Cure) Tried to jump from a high distance but he survived, but he has a limp now, so he can't run normal anymore.
• Nineteen-hundred (The Legend of 1900), or 1900, knowingly stays on a ship rigged to explode.

O

• Sakura Ogawa (Battle Royale) throws herself off a cliff alongside Kazuhiko Yamamoto
• Ophelia (Hamlet), drowning (ambiguous)^[29]
• Othello (Othello), stabs himself^[30]
• Okonkwo (Things Fall Apart), hangs himself

P

• Walter Paisley (A Bucket of Blood), hangs himself after committing multiple murders.
• Frank Pentangeli (The Godfather Part II), slits his wrists.
• Stacker Pentecost (Pacific Rim) detonates a bomb in his Jaeger in a suicide attack after he learns there is no chance of survival for him or his partner, ridding of a Kaiju and making the path to the core for Gipsy Danger more likely.
• Neil Perry (Dead Poets Society), shoots himself
• Petunia (Happy Tree Friends), skins herself with a potato peeler in 'Wishy Washy'
• Phoenix I, in the form of Jean Grey (Uncanny X-Men), telekinetically activates an energy cannon that disintegrates her.^[31]
• Portia (Julius Caesar), "swallows fire"
• Predator (Predator), blows itself up in an attempt to finish Major Alan "Dutch" Schaefer.
• Margaret Prior (Affinity), drowns
• Lane Pryce ( Mad Men), hangs himself in his office after being asked by Don Draper to resign from Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. This was after Don discovered that Lane had forged a check using his name and embezzled money.
• Madelyne Pryor (X-Men), mentally commits suicide by forcing her mind to shut down.^[32]
• Edna Pontellier (The Awakening), drowns herself in the Gulf of Mexico

R

• Daisy Randone (Girl, Interrupted), method is unknown in the novel^[33] while in the movie, she hangs herself and cuts her wrists.
• Ill Ratt (Death Note), real name Carl Darlingbin, shoots himself in the head.
• Susan Rawling (To the Room Nineteen) gasses herself.
• Red (Red Hot Riding Hood), nicknamed Wolf, shoots himself with 2 guns.
• Richard (Go Tell It on the Mountain), slits his wrists.
• Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (Dr. Strangelove), shoots himself.
• Ellen Ripley (Alien 3), throws herself to blast furnace.
• Claire Richards (White Oleander), overdoses on pills.

S

• Sabriya (Ulfat Idilbi's Damascus - the Smile of Sadness) hangs herself from a lemon tree.
• Yuko Sakaki (Battle Royale) jumps from a lighthouse
• General Alexei Sarov (Skeleton Key) shoots himself^[34]
• Campbell Saunders (Degrassi), methods unknown.
• Louise Sawyer (Thelma & Louise), drives off Grand Canyon cliff side with Thelma to escape arrest
• Hanna Schmitz (The Reader), method unknown.
• Raymond Shaw (The Manchurian Candidate), shoots himself in the 1962 film, while it is left unclear how he dies in the novel.
• Dr. Sheppard (narrator of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd), poison
• Shin (Fist of the North Star), jumps from the peak of his tower
• Shun (Children Who Chase Lost Voices), jumps from a ledge.
• Ira Silverstein (The Woods), gunshot in the mouth.^[35]
• David Sinclair (Permanent Record), jumps off a cliff
• John Singer (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter), shoots himself.
• Smerdyakov (The Brothers Karamazov), hanging^[36]
• Septimus Warren Smith (Mrs Dalloway), jumps out of a window
• Sorais, joint Queen of Zu-Vendis (Allan Quatermain), stabs herself
• Ace Stamper (Splendor in the Grass), jumps out of a window
• Harry Stamper (Armageddon), takes A.J.'s place in detonating the bomb to obliterate the asteroid headed for Earth, dying in the blast.
• Trevor Strathmore (Digital Fortress), explosion
• Holly Summers (No More Heroes), places a grenade in her mouth
• Svidrigailov (Crime and Punishment), gunshot to the head^[37]
• Cynthia Swann (The First Wives Club), throws herself off her apartment balcony
• Steven (Steven by Jake Miller) unknown.

T

• T-850 Terminator (Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines), self-destructs by detonating his nuclear cell to destroy the T-X.
• Suzze T (Live Wire), heroin overdose.
• Kiyomi Takada (Death Note), self-immolation.
• Tanida (Letters from Iwo Jima), blows himself up with a grenade.
• General Tanz (The Night of the Generals), shoots himself
• Tarrlok (The Legend of Korra), commits a fratricidal murder-suicide as a means of atoning for the innumerably abysmal transgressions he and his brother Amon and/or Noatak committed during their respective earthly sojourns.
• Bob Taylor (Prisoners), gunshot in the mouth.
• Captain Clark Terrell (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan), shoots himself with a phaser.
• Thee (Ladda Land), shoots himself.^[38]
• Eponine Thenardier (Les Misérables), takes a musket ball for Marius Pontmercy, page 1193
• Floria Tosca, in Puccini’s opera Tosca, jumps from castle rampart^[39]
• Konstantin Gavrilovich Treplyov (The Seagull), shoots himself.
• Bac Hoai Truong (Birds of Paradise Lost), self-immolation.
• Pete Tyler (Doctor Who), dies in the episode "Father's Day"

V

• Eustacia Vye, (The Return of the Native), drowning (possible suicide)
• Sibyl Vane (The Picture of Dorian Gray), drinks poison
• Carlo Ventresca (Angels and Demons), In the movie as Patrick McKenna, self-immolation.
• Winnie Verloc (The Secret Agent) drowns herself in the English Channel.

W

• Toby Jay Wadenah (The Pledge), shoots himself in the head
• Justice Lawrence Wargrave, (And Then There Were None), self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head after murdering nine people on an island
• Harry Waters (In Bruges), shoots himself in the head.
• Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther) and (Werther), gunshot to the head; the fictional suicide touched off a wave of copycat suicides in Europe^[40]
• Montgomery Wick (Vertical Limit), cuts the rope suspending him, falling to his death.
• Campbell Williams (Cold Sassy Tree), shoots himself.
• Eli Wickner (One False Move), shoots himself.
• Dallas "Dally" Winston (The Outsiders), suicide by police after robbing a grocery store.
• Sid Worley (An Officer and a Gentleman), hangs himself.

X

• Xiaodouzi (Farewell My Concubine), real name Cheng Dieyi, stabs himself with a sword.

Y

• Yoshimi Yahagi (Battle Royale), in the film, hangs herself alongside Yuji Kuramuto.
• Kazuhiko Yamamoto (Battle Royale), throws himself off a cliff alongside Sakura Ogawa.
• Haruki Yasutani (A Tale for the Time Being), Kamikaze.
• Adam Yates (The Innocent), gunshot.
• Deanna Yeller (Drop Shot), gunshot in the head.^[41]
• Alaska Young (Looking for Alaska), drives straight into a police car while drunk; it is debated whether it was a suicide or not
• Mary Alice Young (Desperate Housewives), gunshot to the head; the suicide enables the character to portray the role of narrator of the series from a dead point of view.
• Phil Young (The Bill), fed exhaust fumes into his car.
• Goro Yoshida (The Man with the Red Tattoo), seppuku.

Z

• Bertrand Zobrist (Inferno), jumps to his death from Badia Fiorentina.
• Zia (Wristcutters: A Love Story) slits his wrists.

See also

• List of suicides

References