Almost Perfect: When trans girl Sage was in sixth grade, she realized that she was going to grow up to be a man no matter what she did. She attempted to slash her wrists, but only scratched herself, and started bawling at the sight of blood. Her parents made her see a psychiatrist, who told her that transition was possible.
In Another Note, Beyond Birthday uses Self-Immolation as part of his Murder-Suicide plot. He is stopped by Naomi; she doesn't talk him down, but rather blasts him with the fire extinguisher, and gets him medical attention before placing him under arrest. He survives with horrific burns only to later die from a Kira-induced heart attack in prison once he recovers from his injuries.
In Awaken the Stars, Khodī Som shot himself in the skull after his squad was killed in Iraq. Due to the ETKC-51 drug in his body, he woke up 5 minutes later.
In The Bell Jar, Esther tries to kill herself 3 times (by cutting, hanging, and drowning, in order) before she actually attempts to go through with it. She then takes a large amount of sleeping pills in a hole in the basement, only for her to be found, sent to the hospital, and end up in an asylum.
The Bible: A popular cause of death for Judas Iscariot, born of differingaccounts of his demise, is his suicide by hanging in Matthew going so horribly wrong that he suffers a terrible fall that results in his innards spilling out, as in the Acts of the Apostles.
Hazel in Big Blonde attempts suicide by taking a bottle of veronal. Due to her weight, she just ends up in a comatose state.
In A Clockwork Orange, the Narrator Alex can't conventionally kill himself because the thought of violence makes him cripplingly ill - the reason he wants to kill himself in the first place. In a moment of sudden desperation, he leaps from an apartment window, only to break most of his bones and wind up immobile and unable to talk in the hospital instead of dead. Needless to say, he isn't pleased.
In Duma Key, this is Wireman's story. After his wife and daughter died, he decided to shoot himself in the head and actually went through with it. Instead of killing him, the bullet lodged in his brain, causing him trouble later.
Tedrin, the villain in Eden Green, is Patient Zero of an alien needle symbiote that keeps him alive no matter how badly he is hurt. He reveals early on that when he was first infected, he attempted suicide using a gunshot to the head... only to have his brain grow back wrong.
The Essex Serpent: Luke Garrett decides to kill himself by hanging on a belt from a tree. He does it and almost dies but halfway through, he stops because he thinks of his best friend.
Patricia from Eye of a Fly has swallowed roach poison twice. Both times, her son Ernest had to spend the night in the hospital while they pumped her stomach.
In Spenser's The Faerie Queene, the character Despair tries to kill himself over and over and it never works. Believe it or not, this is really creepy.
In the novel Geek Love by Katherine Dunn, the "Bag Man" is a guy who tried to commit suicide but ended up shooting most of his face off. He wears some kind of covering over his face, hence the name.
In the Dresden Files novel Ghost Story, the readers find Harry has done this because he feared becoming a monster as Mab's Winter Knight. So this trope is used in a very convoluted way.
In Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Švejk Švejk tells a story about a cadet driven to suicide by uncertainty of cadets' official status.note Kadett-Stellvertreter — "cadet officer candidate" — a graduate of an officer school who has just started service in his regiment. They were neither soldiers, nor officers, nor NCOs, thus nobody knew if they should get what soldiers get, or what officers get. As a result they got nothing: no food in the canteen, no blankets in the hospital and so on. As Švejk puts it:
...one of them jumped into the river Malše [...] [but] was fished out again alive. In his excitement when he jumped into it he had forgotten that he knew how to swim and has passed swimming test with honours.
In Stephen King's story, "Hearts in Atlantis", a college student who is freaking out about the possibility of flunking out and getting drafted tries to OD on baby aspirin.
In the Heralds of Valdemar series, Vanyel tries to kill himself in the chapel where his dead love Tylendel is laid out pre-burial. His brand-new Companion Yfandes raises the alarm in time for rescuers to save his life, aided by the fact that Vanyel cut his wrists from side to side instead of up the center.
In The Idiot, Ippolit Terentyev attempts to shoot himself in the head, but his gun doesn't fire. Although other characters speculate that he was just Attention Whoring and that he had deliberately loaded his gun incorrectly.
Joanne Greenberg's I Never Promised You a Rose Garden takes place in a mental hospital during the Fifties, from the perspective of teenage inmate Deborah, who was hospitalized after cutting her wrists and bleeding herself out into a basin. Her doctor recognized this as a plea for help, a suicidal gesture, not a true attempt. Another inmate says that "a nut is someone whose noose broke", meaning that failed suicide is a common background for the inmates.
Sylvia Plath's poem "Lady Lazarus", about a woman who wakes up from yet another suicide attempt, angry at the doctors for not letting her die.
Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call.
Before the beginning of Lucky Jim, Margaret tried unsuccessfully to kill herself with sleeping pills. She's still emotionally fragile after the fact.
At the end of Madame Bovary, Emma decides to kill herself by swallowing arsenic, expecting this to be Perfect Poison. However, reality doesn't work that way, and she doesn't die until much later, remaining in agony the entire time.
The Maze Runner: It's revealed in The Death Cure that Newt tried to kill himself by jumping off one of the Walls some time before Thomas' arrival. He survived but broke his leg, hence his permanent limp.
In "A Model Life", James is a maladjusted ex-cop. His depression only made worse while in the model, James attempts to shoot himself. Unfortunately for him, his bullets were replaced with harmless ammo by the staff.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Colonel Aureliano Buendía has his personal physician paint a target on his chest right over his heart, intending to shoot himself after signing a peace agreement. After he survives, it turns out the doctor was smart enough to paint the target in a spot where the bullet would miss every single vital organ.
The Outsider (2018): Fred Peterson decides to hang himself after losing his entire family. He hopes that jumping off a footstool with a noose around his neck will snap his neck, thus instant death. It fails and instead he's strangled, which kicks in his survival reflexes and he tries to save himself. Then the branch breaks. He is found unconscious by his elderly neighbor, who gives him mouth on mouth resuscitation till an ambulance arrives. In the end, Peterson ends up in a coma from which he is unlikely to recover.
Dorothy Parker:'s 1926 poem "Resumé" alludes to the trope:
Razors pain you; Rivers are damp; Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live.
In a very ridiculous scene in Petronius's The Satyricon, widely considered to be the first modern novel (written in ancient Rome), one character tries to hang himself off of a bedpost. The post being so low, he fails, but another character comes in and sees him lying there, thinks he's dead, and tries to kill himself with the first knife he grabs, which turns out to be a prop. Hilarity Ensues.
A Scanner Darkly: Charles Freck tried to commit suicide by taking a bunch of downers with some wine. He failed and only hallucinated. The hallucination might be a Dying Dream - Freck never appears in the story again either way.
Daylen at the beginning of Shadow of the Conqueror, due to having committed Hitler-tier crimes against humanity throughout his life and then seen the error of his ways in his old age. Living on a World in the Sky, he elects to jump off the edge. But since this occurs in chapter three, you probably don't need us to tell you that he doesn't get the result he expected.
The reason why Beth had to enter the parenting rehabilitation program at The School for Good Mothers: she had a history of attempting suicide, and when she was feeling like that, she checked herself into a psychiatric hospital. An ex-boyfriend reported her to the Department of Child Disservices and it was determined that since she had been a danger to herself, she must obviously be a danger to her child.
In The Ship Who... Killed, Helva's brawn partner Kira is a Death Seeker with numerous scars on the inside of her forearms, but she was given extensive conditioning that makes part of her refuse to actually kill herself, no matter how much the rest of her longs for death. They also discover Lia, a crashed brainship embedded in the side of a volcano by a Cult Colony - she had also wanted to die to join her beloved, but hadn't been able to crash hard enough to die and now couldn't move, so used her Compelling Voice to nudge the cult into a Religion of Evil that practiced Human Sacrifice. After Helva gives Kira some Epiphany Therapy that has her shedding the death-drive, they give Lia a Mercy Kill and alert planetary therapists of the condition of the colony.
In Sometimes A Great Notion, Leland is introduced with one of these. As he explains later, he was lying in bed waiting for his house to fill with the gas he'd turned on in the kitchen when he suddenly decides to have a cigarette. The house explodes, but Leland is miraculously unharmed, and he finds a letter from his brother (along with an understandably confused postman) on what's left of his front porch and decides that he might as well return home and help his family fill their logging quota.
Towards the end of John Marsden's Take My Word For It, Lisa reveals that, some time before the book started, she attempted suicide by overdose, but ended up waking up twenty-four hours later feeling awful, and soon realised that no one in the house had even noticed.
In The Vampire Chronicles several vampires including Lestat, Louis, Armand, and Mael attempt to commit Suicide by Sunlight. They end up surviving while suffering severe pain since they are simply too old and powerful.
In Le Voyage où il vous plaira (roughly "Travel where you will"), by Alfred de Musset and PJ Stahl, the devil tolds the tale of a man that tried to commit suicide by hanging himself over a river, taking some poison and, for extra security, shooting himself with a pistol... that misses and cuts the rope so he falls onto the river and drinks too much water that makes him thrown up, cleaning the poison from his stomach. Yes, exactly like the infamous Darwin Award.
In You Only Live Twice, it's an open secret that "Dr. Guntram Shatterhand's" so-called "Garden of Death" full of various poisons and dangers (He's a botanist! So what?) is meant to attract the suicidal. It's also noted, by the time Bond gets there and the bodies have really piled up, how no one botches it and walks away marked; they always come out all-dead.
