An Arm And A Leg / Literature

Amputations in literature.

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• Absolutely Truly: Truly's father lost an arm to an IED (Improvised Explosive Device).
• Ai no Kusabi: Guy loses his left arm when attacked by an enraged Iason, and Iason loses his legs near the end in a fatal situation prompting the tragic ending.
• All Quiet on the Western Front has a plot arc revolving around a pair of boots belonging to one of the original group who loses a leg and subsequently dies of wounds.
• Animorphs, :
  • Visser Three likes to use his tail to chop off body parts or sometimes heads. Fittingly, when he is in a morph he gets his own body parts cut off frequently although, since morphing heals all injuries, he's fine when he demorphs.
  • Marco gets his orca tail torn off in one book. Fortunately, he can demorph and heal as well.
• Area 51:
  • Aspasia's Shadow is wounded by Mike Turcotte in Area 51: The Grail, with one hand shot off. It regenerates once he partakes of the Grail though, albeit fairly slowly.
  • Lisa Duncan's hand is later severed by Garlin too, to use her palm print for opening a secret chamber. It also grows back.
• The Aubrey-Maturin stories contain various amputees. One is an elderly Lieutenant who Aubrey is able to both reward and dispose of by making him Captain of a prize vessel, thus ensuring that the man will be honourably and securely pensioned off; another is a below-knee amputee who appears as Captain of an East Indiaman, being felt to have no career prospects in the Royal Navy with his disability. Tom Pullings' facial scarring is generally reckoned to have hindered his already slim prospects, and an officer who loses part of his nose to frostbite steers every introduction round to his wounding to prevent suspicion that he is syphilitic.
• Aztec: One of the old merchants had to self-amputate when a snake bit him on the foot. And there's Armed Scorpion, cut off at the ankles in a moment of carelessness; had he seen Mixtli, he would have minced the latter and not thought twice about it.
• Bazil Broketail:
  • Bazil hacks off Heruta's arm during the final showdown at the top of a volcano. He doesn't suffer pain from the wound too long, though, since he falls to his death soon thereafter.
  • Burthong hacks off an ogre's leg at knee's height during the battle at Sprian's Ridge.
• Older Than Print: In Beowulf, the title hero rips Grendel's arm off with his bare hands. Grendel runs away, but eventually bleeds to death.
• Midway into Berlin Alexanderplatz the protagonist Franz Biberkopf suffers an injury that loses him an arm, which ends up being amputated.
• In his autobiography Boy, Roald Dahl writes of two significant amputations:
  • His father Harald, who fell from the roof and broke his arm; but some nearby passers-by caused tremendous further damage by dragging him by the broken arm, which then had to be amputated.
  • During a car accident when Roald Dahl was nine years old, he shot through the windscreen, and his nose was cut almost completely off his face, but was sewn on again.
• Early in Nine Gates, the second book of the Breaking the Wall trilogy, Righteous Drum loses an arm in an enemy attack. While it weakens him while he adjusts, all it really does is make him a Handicapped Badass.
• Bruce Coville's Book of... Nightmares: The Hand revolves around a boy named Jimmy, whose family has moved into a house formerly owned by a man who lost his hand in a farming accident. Then the ghostly hand returns from the grave to get help from Jimmy.
• In Children of the Black Sun, Isidro loses the functioning of one arm to torture. In a culture that values strength and pulling your weight, it's a big psychological issue for him as well as a physical one.
• Circleverse: In Magic Steps, the unmage the assassins are using had his legs cut off by pirates so he would be easier to control.
• Hertzer Herrick in John Ringo's Council Wars series loses a hand in the climactic battle at the end of the first book. Of course, being Hertzer, it just serves to make him even more badass.
• Cradle Series: Yerin mentions she's had her arms and legs chopped off before. Thankfully, her master was a master refiner and was able to grow them back easily. Lindon gets his right arm cut off during his duel with Jai Long. Lindon thanks him for this, as the Jai Patriarch was trying to get him to kill Lindon. Lindon soon gets a prosthetic replacement with a Cannibalism Superpower.
• Roland of The Dark Tower loses his right big toe and two fingers from his right hand. Not the most traumatic injury ever, but not without consequence either, since it was his "good" hand and considering what used to be his preferred method of combat. He remarks to himself that at least he masturbates left-handed.
• Version One shows up in Alfred Bester's The Deceivers: mine workers who steal "novaseed" gems — a sort of universal catalyst — must then have their hand amputated to prevent the novaseed-triggered matter-to-energy reaction from slowly consuming their entire body. Novaseed gems are so valuable on the black market there is apparently no shortage of miners willing to trade a hand for economic security.
• Devolution: After the Sasquatches capture Vincent, they slowly dismember him in an effort to draw the rest of the Greenloop inhabitants out. Kate spies one of them waving his severed arm at them from atop a ridge.
• Dexter: Dr. Danco takes Doakes's hands, feet and also tongue, as well as Debbie's boyfriend's arm and leg.
• In The Dinosaur Lords, Karyl loses his right hand to a raptor and is forced to go without it for several months. Later, Aphrodite regrows it for him.
• Rani from Disney Fairies sacrificed her wings to save her Pixie Hollow. She can no longer fly, however she is now the only fairy who can swim.
• Some of the characters in the Dragons of Requiem series lose at least one of their limbs at some point during battles. The most notable case is King Raem Seran, who has both his arms and legs bitten off by Laira and Jeid.
• In Dr. Franklin's Island, Semi is transformed into a fish creature. Part of the way through, her arms and legs go numb and unresponsive and she's unable to move them. After a couple of days she realizes that her mind has sort of 'dumped' her limbs, coming to regard them as unimportant and not really part of her, looking like dead wood. She stops being coherent for a good while after that and wakes up as something like a manta ray - whether her limbs fell off or were absorbed isn't shown, but she does have a pair of small, useless, vestigial flippers that become her feet when she transforms back.
• Edgar Freemantle from Stephen King's Duma Key loses his right arm. He choice to forgo a prosthesis allows for him to channel power through his 'mojo' arm.
• Dungeon Crawler Carl: Severed limbs are one of the few things that the dungeon can't heal (except with specific races or classes, or expensive healing items).
• Endo and Kobayashi Live! The Latest on Tsundere Villainess Lieselotte: A year before present day in the story's timeline, Fiene was attacked by some assassins and had one of her arms cut off... except she immediately reattached it with healing magic and proceeded to defeat the attackers.
• Evening of Eve and Adam loses her right arm and leg in the first sentence of the book.
• In The Faerie Queene, King Arthur cuts off a giant’s arm in his attempt to rescue Redcross, which makes the giant so furious that he strikes Arthur harder with his club than he could have with two hands. If not for his magical shield, Arthur would be dead.
• In the novels and animated version of Fate/Zero, Sola-Ui gets her right arm cut off by Maiya to remove the Command Spells that let her control Diarmuid!Lancer, which she got after subjecting Kayneth to Fingore.
  > Sola-Ui: "My right hand... my hand..."
• Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation: Mo Dao Zu Shi is fond of chopping off the bad characters' limbs.
  • Mo Xuanyu's abusive cousin Mo Xiyuan loses his left arm after being possessed by an evil spirit and dies shortly afterward, kickstarting the crisis at Mo Manor.
  • The Yi City Arc Villain Xue Yang gets his arm chopped off by Lan Wangji at the end of their fight and later dies offscreen from the blood loss.
  • The dismembered limbs the protagonists hunt down turn out to belong to Nie Mingjue, who is a prominent figure in the flashbacks; the latter died thanks to the Big Bad's schemes and became a fierce corpse (the series' equivalent to a zombie) — said corpse was so ferocious and difficult to contain in his secret base that the Big Bad had no choice but to dismember the body and hide each part in different locations of the country.
  • The Big Bad Jin Guangyao holds Jin Ling hostage by holding a sharp qin string against his neck. When he is later sent into a panic and comes dangerously close to cutting off the teen's head, Lan Wangji swiftly saves the latter by chopping off the Big Bad's right arm, allowing the string to loosen and set Jin Ling free.
• In Guns of the Dawn, Emily's brother-in-law, Tubal, finishes the war minus a leg. He's not as bitter about it as he might be — after all, a lot of the people he fought beside got worse.
• Harry Potter:
  • Peter Pettigrew cuts off his own hand to help resurrect Voldemort in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Earlier, he had cut off a finger from that same hand to fake his death.
  • Speaking of Harry Potter, this is also the reason the Care of Magical Creatures post is available for Hagrid, as Dumbledore pointed out during Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban:
    Dumbledore: I am sorry to say that Professor Kettleburn has retired from his post at the end of last term, in order to enjoy more time with his remaining limbs.
• Three examples in Heart of Steel. In all cases the limbs were replaced with either biological (Julia's) or mechanical (everyone else's) parts:
  • Alistair Mechanus' backstory includes a car accident that cost him his left arm and both legs.
  • Julia Parker loses a leg to the shark-man Scarface.
  • Julia's boyfriend Jim is torn in half and loses an arm during the same even that cost Julia her leg.
• Honor Harrington's arm was shredded by flechettes when escaping a prison ship. Ordinarily that wouldn't be a problem for their tech, which would have been able to grow her a new one when she got back home, but thanks to a quirk in her genetics her body rejects such procedures and she gets an almost as good prosthetic — with a built in gun. Previously, she had also lost the same eye (right) and arm (left) as her historical pattern, Vice Admiral the Viscount Sir Horatio Nelson.
• Lieutenant Bush of the Horatio Hornblower books loses his leg in the battle at the end of Ship of the Line. He gets a wooden one and learns how to walk on it in Flying Colours, and while he's slated to be a desk captain, Hornblower makes him the captain of his squadron's lead ship in The Commodore.
• How to Sell a Haunted House: Louise cuts off her brother's arm with a chainsaw in order to save him from being possessed by a sapient demonic glove puppet who's taken over his body and is on that arm.
• How to Train Your Dragon: Alvin the Treacherous starts off with a Hook Hand, explaining that he lost his hand to the booby-trapped coffin of Grimbeard the Ghastly. He then proceeds to lose another body part for each encounter with Hiccup and his friends, until he is a one-eyed, one-handed, one-legged, noseless, hairless shell of a man.
• How The Six Made Their Way In The World: One of the soldier's five companions has Super-Speed and has somehow removed one of his legs in order to slow himself down.
• Averted in The Hunger Games. Peeta loses his left leg in the arena but it bears so little impact on the plot and characterization that you wonder what the whole point of it was. The only effect it seems to have is that he's a bit unsteady on his feet when Katniss leaps into his arms for the first few months after the amputation. Oh, and there is one scene where Katniss feels guilty over him losing his leg. Other than that you would never notice that he's lost a limb and the movie version didn't even bother to include it.
  • Although it does have some impact in the Quarter Quell of "Catching Fire". Which, in turn, makes Peeta come off as more of The Load in the second film because they removed the reason why he can't keep up with the other characters physically.
• Inheritance Cycle: The high priest of Dras-Leona's evil cult has given all four of his limbs as sacrifices to the gods.
• In Stephen King's It, Pennywise pulls off Georgie Denbrough's arm, which ends up with him bleeding profusely until death. The same thing happens in the TV miniseries and movie. Eddie's cause of death at the end of the book mirrors Georgie's at its opening: Pennywise bites off one of his arms and he eventually bleeds to death. Unlike Georgie, however, his fate is changed slightly in the filmed versions, where he's Impaled with Extreme Prejudice instead.
• James Bond:
  • Bond's CIA friend Felix Leiter had his arm and leg bitten off by a shark twice. First in Ian Fleming's Live and Let Die, and again in John Gardner's novelization of Licence to Kill, since Gardner's film novelizations kept the continuity of Fleming's books.
  • One villain's arms are severed in Nobody Lives for Ever with a guillotine after an ill-fated attempt to grab a gun by reaching for it under the blade.
  • A villain in the Young Bond novel Double or Die has his legs whipped off by a loose towrope. The rest of his body presumably flew into the sea.
• Jane Eyre: Mr. Rochester was badly hurt when there was a fire at Thornfield. One hand was so crushed that a surgeon had to amputate it.
• Kingdom on Fire: A couple of examples over the course of the series.
  • In A Poison Dark and Drowning, After getting sprayed by Nemneris' acidic foam, Dee gets scarred across his face, and loses half of his left arm.
  • In the climax of A Sorrow Fierce and Falling, Maria chops off her own hand with an axe both to deal the portal to the Ancients' realm, and also to free herself from being used as a puppet by Mary Willoughby's spirit.
• In the Lensman series, Kimball Kinnison at one point gets captured and tortured. Among the tortures is a deliberate infection that forces the Patrol to amputate both arms and both legs to save his life, once they get him back.
• Bernard Wolfe's science fiction novel Limbo is all about a society where self-amputation is encouraged by the culture, using Artificial Limbs only during sport. It is seen as a moral equivalent to warfare, a case of literal disarmament.
• The Lotterys Plus One: Diamond, the Lottery family's dog, is missing one of her back legs.
• Machine Man has Dr. Charles Neumann first lose one leg at the thigh, then the other. Both losses are treated realistically. The worst of it is when he has to sever his own left arm at the shoulder as a Life-or-Limb Decision.
• Tammy Maheswaran from MARiiMO lost her right hand in the car accident that killed her parents seven years ago, the day before her twenty-first birthday.
• A Master of Djinn: Ahmad foil's Abigail's plans by biting off her hand, the Ring of Power she's wearing included.
• In Tad William’s Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn Prince Josua Erkynlander lost his right hand in a skirmish getting him the nickname 'Josua Lackhand'. Luckily for a swordsman, he was left-handed.
• Ashley Gaynes in Blackbirds is envisioned by the main character Miriam Black to die in his eighties, having lost his left foot sometime after their first meeting. He loses it later in the novel courtesy of Ingersoll.
• Also from King: Misery. In the novel, Annie cuts off Paul's foot to "hobble" him, taken from the slave narratives and Congo examples as listed below. The scene, while averted in the film, is even more horrific. She breaks both feet with a sledgehammer.
• Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick lost his leg to the whale, motivating his vendetta.
• Suffering from the disorder mentioned in the Real Life entry below, one of the characters takes off her own leg in the novella Monster P*rn, by KJ Moore.
• Nemesis Series: Dreadnought has Calamity losing an arm after being hit by Utopia's inversion beam.
• Nevermoor: Nancy "Nan" Dawson used to be a professional dragonrider, but was forced into an early retirement after one of them tore her leg off and ate it. She now has a prosthetic, and focuses on training Hawthorne, a dragonriding prodigy. Overall, she doesn't seem too bothered by it, and has adjusted to her situation quite well.
• Nina Tanleven: In the backstory of The Ghost in the Big Brass Bed, Cornelius Fletcher sustained major leg injuries in World War I. A few years later, his wounded legs were further damaged to the point of no return from frostbite, and subsequently amputated.
• The Obsidian Chronicles:
  • The sex slaves in the House of Carnal Society have their feet amputated to prevent them running away.
  • Black also has the bandits who were capturing after attacking the caravan in the Desolation maimed by having their dominant hands amputated since otherwise they could attack travelers once again.
• Old Kingdom: At the climax of Abhorsen, the Disreputable Dog bites Lirael's right hand off to save her from having to make a Heroic Sacrifice to bind Orannis the Destroyer. Sam makes her a magical prosthetic out of gold.
• Pax: Runt gets his leg blown off by a mine. Vola lost a leg in the war.
• Portrait in Sepia: Severo del Valle returns to Chile and goes to war. He gets a leg wound that requires him to get his leg amputated without any kind of anesthetic. The post-op conditions are even worse due to the overcrowding and filth.
• The Return of the Condor Heroes: In Chapter 24, Yang Guo gets his right arm cut off by Guo Fu, daughter of Guo Jing, losing a lot of blood as a result. Despite this, he goes on to become a powerful swordsman whose disability would not prevent him from being able to engage other opponents in combat.
• Quantum Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner
  • Cielo loses his arm in his efforts to stop the Solids from abducting Sera. His Healing Factor allows him to reattach, it, but it takes a specialized and experimental surgery and a lot of time spent in recovery.
  • In the next book, Bat has his wings burned off by Heat. While he also has Healing Factor he is not as lucky as Cielo.
• In The Shattered Kingdoms, Isa agrees to have her arm amputated to stop the spread of sunlight-inflicted damage (her people being Weakened by the Light). Given that her culture exiles people with such "deformities" to their deaths, it's unsure for a while whether she'd want it done or not, since she might feel she's as good as dead either way.
• In the Sherlock Holmes spin-off novel The Thinking Engine by James Lovegrove, the titular 'Thinking Engine' is actually a hollow construct with Professor Moriarty inside it, but Moriarty has been left hideously crippled by his fall after his last confrontation with Holmes, to the point that he has lost both legs and one arm as they had to be amputated when he was rescued, as well as his larynx being so badly damaged that he can only still only just speak on his own after spending over three years 'healing'.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Jaime Lannister has his hand cut off by a rival at one point. It's rather worse than just the loss of a hand though, as he's a knight (and one of the best swordsmen around), and his sword hand was the one chopped off.
  • In the history of this world, related in The World of Ice & Fire, Orys Baratheon Was captured by the Dornish and had his sword hand chopped off by Wyl of Wyl the second time Aegon invaded Dorne. He later paid the debt back by capturing Walter Wyl, the son of Wyl of Wyl, and cut off his sword hand. Then he cut off Walter's other hand and both feet due to interest gathered over the years since his own hand was cut off.
• Stardoc: Jory's bad knee results in the loss of that leg in the final chapter of Blade Dancer.
• Star Wars Expanded Universe:
  • Star Wars: Ahsoka: Selda, the owner of the cantina on Raada, is mentioned to have lost an arm and a leg in the same farming accident that Kaeden and Miara Larte's parents died in. During the evacuation of Raada at the end of the book, Vartan is shot by an Imperial tank and loses two limbs, with Selda joking that they now match.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Darth Bane: Dynasty of Evil: Zannah manages to slice off one of Bane's arms with her Force Tendrils in their last fight. After it ends, it's the only thing left of him.
  • In the X-Wing Series, Ton Phanan lost an arm and half of his face during the assault on the second Death Star, having to get replacement parts. This prompted him to switch from the field of medicine to that of killing people as a pilot — problem was, he kept getting hurt, and since he was allergic to the best medicine around, this meant becoming more and more mechanical.
  • In The Courtship of Princess Leia, Chewbacca finally demonstrates the arm-ripping Han mentioned in the original movie, tearing a Nightsister's arm completely off so fast Isolder didn't even see it.
  • Splinter of the Mind's Eye has Luke, fighting against Darth Vader, manage to cut off one of the Dark Lord's arms. Not perturbed by this, Vader picks up his lightsaber with his remaining hand and keeps fighting.
  • Galaxy of Fear: Eppon can just instantly regrow a severed limb. Several books later, a smuggler is less lucky. When he's injured, a friendly tribe calling themselves The Children offer to take care of him, and they neatly remove the injured appendages to have for dinner. Offered a bowl in good spirits, the viewpoint character had just seen his injured buddy, decides to take the bowl anyway, and only figures it out at the last moment, when the spoon he lifts has a ring in it.
  • Tenel Ka of Young Jedi Knights lost an arm in a training accident and refused to get a replacement.
• Near the end of Tailchaser's Song, the Tagalong Kid Pouncequick has his tail ripped off by Scratchnail.
• Temeraire:
  • Victory of Eagles: Played for Dissonant Serenity when a soldier reflexively tries to stop a rolling cannonball with his foot mid-battle. He's too shocked to react, and Will, having seen it happen before, matter-of-factly reassures him that it's a clean amputation and helps walk him to a medic.
  • Crucible of Gold: Butt-Monkey Granby ends up losing an arm during a botched mission. It's not from any one incident, but from a bad break that repeatedly gets aggravated until it requires amputation.
• Thebe and the Angry Red Eye is about an ill-fated space voyage. One engineer's leg is torn off when the ship crashes, although the protagonist notes that exposure to vacuum would have killed him anyway.
• In Three Dark Crowns the Temple higher-ups cut off novice priestess Elizabeth's hand with a serrated knife as punishment for helping Queen Mirabella run away. It is done mostly to punish Mirabella through guilt.
• In The Tide Child trilogy by RJ Barker, protagonist Joron the Deck Keeper of the Tide Child had splinters from a bone ship embed into his leg after the island he was on was destroyed by a sea dragon (a.k.a keyshan). The splinters were removed and he'd be okay, except he was also suffering from deckchild's disease (that setting's name for scurvy) and worse yet, he had keyshan's rot. With all that combined, the wound in his leg became septic and needed to be amputated.
• Eric Flint's Alternate History series Trail of Glory: In The Rivers of War Sergeant Driscol has a lower arm mangled by a British volley at the Battle of Chippawa, during the War of 1812. The later amputation of the limb and recovery period is what puts him in a position to help in the defense of Washington, DC along with Sam Houston, changing the course of history.
• In To Welcome Oblivion, Kaya Seratin's arms are violently severed off by Rhett Talbot nine years prior to the events of the story.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • In The Silmarillion, Maedhros asks his friend Fingon to cut his hand off in a Life-or-Limb Decision while he is shacked to a mountainside.
  • Beren and Lúthien: Beren gets his hand bitten off by the giant wolf Carcharoth, and ends up with the nickname "Beren One-Hand".
• In The Traitor Son Cycle, Gabriel and the Wyrm lose matching arms in their first battle against Ash — the former by magic eating through the energy shield he's been casting, and the latter by having it torn off.
• Waltharius: In the final combat, Walther cuts off Gunther's leg, shortly after Hagen cuts off Walther's hand, and then Walther cuts Hagen across the face and rips his eye out. With none of them able to fight on, the poem dedicates a moment to the image of Gunther's leg, Walther's hand, and Hagen's eye lying harmoniously side by side on the ground.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • In Ravenor, Carl Thonius loses his right arm to an angry native wielding a chainsword when a routine mission goes horribly wrong. While they manage to surgically reattach the arm, Carl loses the fine motor skills needed for his role as Ravenor’s computer expert, and sinks into depression as a result. He starts dabbling in Chaos-tainted flects as a coping mechanism, which leads to him getting possessed by the daemon Slyte in Ravenor Returned.
  • From Eisenhorn, Gregor Eisenhorn loses a hand in battle, in one of the short stories. Not caring for the prosthetic he was provided, he eventually has it surgically replaced with a vat grown duplicate.
  • Ciaphas Cain (HERO OF THE IMPERIUM) has two augmetic fingers, having lost them to a Necron gauss weapon.
• In Warrior Cats this has happened twice, both with tails:
  • In Sunset, Berrykit gets his tail caught in a fox trap and badly mangled, foreshadowing the danger they'll pose later on in the book. The Medic Leafpool determines that she can't save it, and amputates it, leaving a stump. The injury makes the kit's mother so afraid of life in the wild that she temporarily leaves the Clan with her kits to return to the barn where they were born.
  • In the sixth arc, A Vision of Shadows, half of Finpaw's tail has to be amputated to free him from a massive, heavy branch that the cats cannot shift. The situation emphasizes SkyClan's need for a medicine cat, and it is during his stay in the medicine den that he and Twigpaw first start to realize their feelings for each other.
• Rand in The Wheel of Time loses a hand to one of the Forsaken. The casual manner in which he shrugs it off ("I guess I'll have to learn the sword again") is presented as further evidence of his degrading mental state. A few books later, he admits it does bother him, which is reasonable since it seems at that point that the fate of the world depends on his winning a sword fight.
• The Tin Man from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was based off of the American Civil War amputees Baum saw growing up.

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