#1
To better understand this literary device, Pierre Demery suggests looking at it from two angles.
"From a narrative perspective, I would define a sad character death as an event that emotionally alters how the affected characters (usually the protagonist) view and navigate the world in which the narrative takes place in," he told Bored Panda.
"From an audience perspective, a sad character death is exactly what it is: a heart-breaking, tear-jerking, tragic ending for a (usually beloved or fan-favorite) character."
#2
We asked Demery how he would answer the post's question himself, and the writer said that, again, two losses come to mind. Executed differently, but both are very poignant.
"One is the death of Mufasa from The Lion King. Those of us who've seen the movie as kids will forever be scarred by it (pun intended)," he recalled. "Mufasa, Simba's father and the king of Pride Rock, is portrayed as a kind, nurturing, strong, and loving figure in his son Simba's life, and only wanted him to feel safe and prepared for when he becomes the new king. Unfortunately, his jealous and sadistic brother Scar pushes Mufasa off a cliff into a stampeding herd of wildebeest, then places the blame on Simba."
"But that's not the end. We have to watch Simba confront his father's body, trying to wake him up. Absolutely devastating to have the protected find the protector in this way."
#4
"These examples stand out to me because, in the first one, you have the loss of someone who represents a compass or a guiding light taken from a character who needs them but is instead left with an emptiness inside them and no one to give them direction," Demery explained. "The second example shows that you can lose someone and be the person wishing you could have done more for them by being better or different in some way."
The writer believes we empathize with certain characters more than others because "we attach ourselves to them, treat them like mirrors of ourselves, or see qualities of ourselves in them."
"Sometimes these characters remind us of other people in our lives who we have a close connection with. When we see these characters die or they lose someone important to them, our empathy feels real because in some capacity we've experienced it too and it brings up those emotions," he added.
#6
John Skelton, Emeritus Professor at the University of Birmingham, had been working with applied linguistics, and in his paper Death and dying in literature, he said that one of the central tasks of literature is to impose a structure on life and death, giving meaning to both. According to him, literature as a discipline aims just as certainly as science does to understand the world in which we live and to interpret our own role as participants in the human condition.
He too thinks we can approach the topic from two sides. "At one end of the scale is one of the most common types of death in all fiction, the discovery of the body in the 'whodunnit' or murder mystery," Skelton wrote. The other is often called a 'whydunnit', in which the identity of the killer is not as important as his or her motivation.
"Bear in mind here that the greatest of all constraints on the writers of whodunnits is that they cannot describe the motivations of their characters well, or it will be at once clear who is the killer," Skelton pointed out. "The complete blandness of Agatha Christie's characters is necessary, in this respect, to fulfill the genre's requirements – or at least it is a happy accident. Contrast this with Charles Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which is, among other things, a whodunnit. Famously, Dickens died before revealing the identity of the killer, but it can be determined with near certainty from the imagery and symbolism with which Dickens surrounds him throughout the book."
#8
#9
But why bother going through all of this emotional distress? Well, as Skelton beautifully put it, "literature, if we trust its strength and accept that to become its student is to undertake something always rich and often difficult, is a way of understanding what it is to be human." And I think that applies to other forms of storytelling, too.
So sob away folks, you should come out stronger.
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