The Demise as Plot Device

 If we are all too aware of Thomas Hardy's use of plot twists, reading the ten stories in the Group of Noble Dames, and in any humber of other places, one is aware how many characters meet their demise at just the right time to progress the narrative. One could look at it the other way and say that is what makes them stories worth telling. I won't hear a word against Hardy, especially the pessimism, but undesirable husbands die in order to give the deserving suitor their opportunity only for them to be otherwise tragically disappointed. But it has made me wonder if deaths are not an overused plot device in fiction.

As was said here more than once during my Graham Swift period, one is always anticipating the bereavement. One knows it is coming and every novel is tinged with the loss. For him it's not a plot device but a perspective. It is a device when the story's further development is caused by it.

In Hamlet, the murder of Claudius has already happened and the unfolding traumas depend on it. The death of Polonius causes the second revenge plot but both of these departures have deeper significance than mere accelerators of the action. In the case of Polonius, Hamlet might not know who he's stabbing and, furthermore, might not be too concerned in the heat of the moment exactly who it is but, yes, it's probably a mistake. Having finally been spurred to take action, he gets it wrong.

Shakespeare's main characters die from their flawed nature, Hardy's from their cruel circumstances and those deaths are the end of the story, not like minor characters who have to be sacrificed to move it on.

I remember Julian Barnes objecting to 'significant weather' as being too obvious and the mortality rate of characters in fiction sacrificed to the storytellers art is also a cause for concern.

The greatest prose fiction in the language is James Joyce's The Dead, in which the bereavement is previous but paralyses the present. Gabriel Conroy is told that a young man, Michael Furey, died for the love of Gretta, Gabriel's wife, and is diminished by the love she had for him. He can never mean as much to her as that idealized boyfriend from her past and even if it enriches his appreciation of what's possible, it excludes him.

It's not just a story, it's not much of a story as such at all. The dying isn't necessarily the saddest thing, the saddest thing is Gabriel who hadn't known, whose fault it wasn't but who cannot live up to the beatified memory of the young man but can still have 'life' revealed to him.

Hardy is a great story teller with his class divisions, moral compass and stoic acceptance. Joyce is in a different league, though.