Better To Die Than Be Killed / Literature

---

• In Animorphs, an unnamed controller scientist decided that he would rather die of Kandrona Starvation (a horrifically painful death) than be killed by Visser Three.
• In Assassin's Creed: Renaissance, Archbishop Salviati chooses suicide to letting Ezio get information on the other conspirators from him.
• In Awake in the Night Land, people who adventure to the titular Night Land have a Cyanide Pill in their arms so they can bite it in a hopeless situation, which is to prevent the lovecraftian monsters of the setting from Destroying their souls.
• Invoked in The Belgariad when Silk is captured by Taur Urgas, facing torture and execution come sunrise. Yarblek mentions having attempted to get close enough to slip him a dagger so he can open a vein.
• Ben Snow: In "The Man in the Alley", the mastermind behind the assassination of President William McKinley chooses to commit suicide when he realises Ben has enough evidence to expose him: especially after Ben points out several Lincoln conspirators were hanged on flimsier evidence.
• Various variations from The Bible:
  • In the Book of Judges: "King" Abimalech, after having a millstone dropped on his skull by a woman, manages to survive long enough to ask an attendant to finish him off, to avoid the humiliation of having been killed by a woman. So, Older Than Feudalism.
  • In the Books of Samuel: In 1 Samuel 31, a wounded King Saul tried to get his armorbearer to kill him so he wouldn't fall into the hands of the Philistines, who he feared would "thrust me through, and abuse me." When the armorbearer refused, Saul killed himself.
  • Later, in 2 Samuel, a man claimed to have killed Saul on his request, though this was a ploy to ingratiate himself to David. In fact Saul's armorbearer had committed suicide along with his king. The attempt to gain bonus points backfired.
• The Blood Guard: Head Truelove jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge to his death upon being cornered by the Blood Guard.
• The Christopher Pike novel Chain Letter 2 has an unusual twist on this. Alison decides to shoot herself when she realizes that her boyfriend Tony was going to kill her under the influence of the Caretaker demon. The twist is that Alison's actions were meant to protect Tony: if Tony obeyed the Caretaker and killed her, the Caretaker would be able to take his soul. If Alison was the one who pulled the trigger, however, the Caretaker would be unable to drag Tony off to Hell. Alison's actions triggered a My God, What Have I Done? moment for Tony. And Alison got better.
• The Chronicles of Dorsa: The survivors from Megs' band took refuge in a burial mound. Rather than be captured and enslaved, they killed themselves.
• Ciaphas Cain: The Greater Good sees Tau Water Caste and Imperial Navy vessels self-destructing rather than have the biomass of their crews consumed by a tyranid hive fleet. In the latter case it's mentioned there's a recording of a Navy ship's chief engineer triggering the reactor overload sequence moments before being torn apart by tyranid boarders.
• The Circle Opens: The villain of Street Magic poisons herself in her room rather than be arrested and humiliated for killing the local police's undercover agents, as well as countless commoners, since there's no chance in hell that her aristocratic family is going to protect her.
• Fernand shoots himself in the head in The Count of Monte Cristo, having had his treacherous past exposed.
• Appears on a massive scale in Richard Matheson's short story "The Creeping Terror". The city of Los Angeles is revealed to be sentient, and, as the title implies, slowly grows to take over the entire United States. As it does, it brainwashes everyone it comes into contact with, making them lose their past identities and become shallow, Hollywood-obsessed idiots. When Los Angeles reaches Boston, the entire population of the city decides to commit mass suicide rather than surrender their free will.
• Father Callahan from The Dark Tower. Justified in that he was fighting vampires that would turn him if they got to kill him.
• In Death Star, a bunch of Mooks and low-level contractors working on, well, the Death Star find themselves horrified and galvanized into action as it becomes clear that the titular battle station isn't going to be used as deterrent and maybe to explode a small exoplanet now and then to scare people. Lacking confidence in their own ability to stop it from within, they decide that finding a way to leave and at least not participate in these atrocities is the best they can do, so they load up into a medical shuttle and try to fly off. This attempt ends with their shuttle caught in a tractor beam and being slowly reeled back in, so the deserters decide to overload the engines and be killed - if they're captured they'll probably be tortured and maybe their homeworlds are next. Fortunately for them, this attempt was during the Battle of Yavin and this was Just in Time for the Death Star to explode.
• Subverted in Evelyn Waugh's novel Decline and Fall where one character, Grimes, who is an example of The Barnum tells of "landing in the soup" (an Unusual Euphemism for being caught engaged in homosexual conduct) during World War I and being placed in a room and given a loaded revolver and some whiskey to settle his nerves, so that a court martial could be avoided and the official story would be that he died in combat. After debating this course of action, he decides he would rather live and is found roaring drunk when his fellow soldiers re-enter the room.
• In the Dirk Pitt Adventures book Sahara, when it looks like the Malians are about to overrun Fort Foreau, Dirk prepares to kill Eva and the rescued women so the enemy doesn't get to rape them. Fortunately, The Cavalry arrives just in time.
• At the end of the book of Double Indemnity (not the movie), Walter and Phyllis are spotted on board the ship, and rather than face arrest and execution, they commit mutual suicide by jumping overboard.
• In Dr. Franklin's Island as it sinks in for Semi that she and Miranda aren't going to be able to escape being transformed and either killed or turned into monsters, she goes berserk, bites an orderly, and flings herself at an electrified fence. The Mad Scientist owning the island had said in her hearing that the fence had been reactivated, but he was lying and anticipating that she'd do this, and despite Semi's struggles she's restrained again. At the climax of the book, the teens are backed into a corner and decide that it's preferable to go out fighting than to be experimented on further, or vivisected. Fortunately for them they manage to kill Doctor Franklin instead.
• In the Dr. Thorndyke story "The Aluminium Dagger", the murderer shoots himself when he realises that his arrest is imminent.
• The Duel of Sorcery Trilogy: At the beginning of Moongather, Serroi panics and bolts, leaving a severely injured Tayyan behind. It's later revealed that Tayyan cut her own throat rather than be captured.
• In Enchantress from the Stars, Elana, a 14-year-old girl from The Federation, is captured by colonists from The Empire. The colonists intend to bring her to their home planet, where she will be dissected and interrogated (and thanks to their tech, The Empire can extract any information they want). Not wanting to end like this, Elana runs towards the imperial rock-chever, intent on being crushed by falling debris. She is rescued Just in Time, and the imperials are so... amazed by the way she is rescued that they withdraw and leave her behind.
• In Esther Hautzig's The Endless Steppe: A Girl in Exile, Esther's 85-year-old grandmother Reisa hears that the Nazis are coming to take her to a concentration camp and decides that if it's time for her to die, she wants to die in her own home. Esther says, "It was not suicide; by a supreme act of will, this old woman cheated the Nazis of her death."
• The Enemy: In the third book in the series, Olivia, cornered by the Collector, throws herself off his balcony, choosing a quick death from falling several storeys over the torture he has inflicted on his previous victims.
• It is said in Book II of The Faerie Queene that the British queen Bunduca killed herself rather than be captured by the Romans. The author praises her for this murder by comparing her to women from ancient history and Classical Mythology like Semiramis, Hypsiphil, and Tomyris.
• In Firefight, Megan shoots themself rather than be burned alive. In addition to being over a lot faster, fire is their weakness, meaning that it is actually considerably more dangerous. By dying to a bullet instead, her Resurrective Immortality is able to trigger, while fire would have killed her permanently.
• Invoked multiple times in Frostflower and Thorn. The death penalty in this world tends to be very harsh, involving basically being slowly tortured to death, so the main characters are almost as preoccupied with not being captured alive in case of failure as with achieving their goals.
• Gaunt's Ghosts: Jagdea, cornered in the control room with no way to work it, takes out poison pills to avoid capture in The Guns of Tanith. Bonin doesn't let her, and someone who does know how to work arrives in time.
• In Robert E. Howard's poem "The Gold and the Grey", the Cimbri women kill themselves with daggers in order to avoid being enslaved by the Romans ("The Cimbri yield no virgin-slaves to glut the lords of Rome!"). One of them kills her rapist and then kills herself.
• Jendara's Suicide by Cop at the end of Green Rider. Justifiably: Her way, she gets run through, and dies quickly and relatively painlessly. If she'd been taken alive, her death would have been hideously painful and drawn out over the course of a month.
• The Han Solo Trilogy:
  • Moff Sarn Shild kills himself after his failed attack on Nar Shaddaa. Having received word that the Emperor has summoned him back to Coruscant and made it clear he is most displeased, Sarn figures that anything would be better than facing Palpatine's wrath—and almost certainly a slow and agonizing death. Given just how sadistic Palpatine famously is and that he knew the Moff was planning to rebel against him,^*Though Shild doesn't know this, Palpatine intentionally set him up to fail. it's very likely that Shild was right.
  • After transmitting the plans to Princess Leia's ship, the surviving members of Bria's unit (including Bria herself) all kill themselves by taking poison pills rather than to risk being later captured and tortured into giving up the information by the Empire, then no doubt being killed.
• In Harry Potter, Albus Dumbledore has Severus Snape kill him to prevent Draco Malfoy from doing so and to ingratiate himself (Snape) with Voldemort. When Snape protests this plan, Dumbledore points out that he would rather die quickly and painlessly than to fall into the hands of Fenrir Greyback or Bellatrix Lestrange, who like to play with their food. It factored in the decision that Dumbledore was already dying because of a curse Voldemort placed on the Horcrux ring.
• Hercule Poirot:
  • In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Poirot offers the revealed murderer a day before he contacts the authorities, in order to kill himself and prevent family disgrace.
  • He also allows the suicide of the murderer in Death on the Nile
  • He prevents the suicide in The ABC Murders because he believes that the murderer does not deserve an easy death.
  • And in Peril at End House, he casually mentions to Hastings that the culprit took their secret stash of coke with them when arrested, likely to commit suicide by overdose.
• The Histories: After avenging her brother by killing a "a vast number of Egyptians", Queen Nitocris of Egypt suffocates herself in a room full of hot ashes to escape being killed at the hands of her people.
• In Horus Heresy: The Flight of the Eisenstein When Horus bombs Istvaan III with the life eater virus, both the dreadnought Huron-Fal and Ullis Temeter, one of the captains of the Death Guard gets infected by the virus. While they both agonize due to the extremely painful effects of the virus, Huron-Fal detonates the core of the giant dreadnought armor, causing an explosion that kills them both.
  "This death... This death is ours. We choose it. We deny you your victory."
• In The Host (2008), Melanie and a few other people attempt suicide to prevent being captured and taken over.
• Humanx Commonwealth: In Bloodhype, when the mysterious black substance they're experimenting on abruptly tears its way out of containment and engulfs several AAnn technicians, two of the reptilian scientists get trapped in a corridor between security doors. One hastily (and wisely) shoots his companion and then himself, before the black substance — actually a ravenous intergalactic predator, the Vom — can flood the corridor and eat them alive.
• In the second book of The Immortals the Lord and Lady of Dunlath commit treason against their country. When they hear their king has found out, Lady Yolane says no place in the country will be safe and tries to flee to Carthak. Lord Belden believes that fleeing will only further the ruination of his good name but doesn't want to be tried and executed either, so he pens a suicide note and takes poison.
• Xanatos does this in the eighth Jedi Apprentice book when his crimes are exposed and he's cornered by Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan. He jumps into one of the acid pools his company created on Telos.
• One group of human survivors in The Killing Star who are being actively chased by the alien invaders ultimately choose to destroy themselves along with a fair portion of the Sun rather than risk what might happen to them when they're captured.
• In Krabat, Merten tries to kill himself, after his cousin Michal dies. (It doesn't work.)
• The Last Days of Krypton: A variant occurs when Zod is about to be thrown into the Phantom Zone. Despite how much that fate terrifies him, he chooses to defiantly dive into it himself rather than wait for the guards to push him in.
  He had only one possible option, and Zod vowed to do this on his own terms! Let historians record this ending with awe!
• Legacy of the Aldenata: In Gust Front, Tommy Sunday, Jr. and his future girlfriend make a promise that if one is unable to kill themself, the other will do it for them, instead of leaving them alive for the Posleen to find and invite for dinner.
• In The Lord of the Rings, Denethor, insane and sure of defeat in the long run, burns himself to death (and tried to take his son with him) rather than let himself be killed or his corpse fall into the hands of Sauron's forces.
• The Lost Fleet: In the Beyond the Frontier follow-up trilogy, the bear-cows are Absolute Xenophobes who view any predator as a natural threat that must be eliminated at all costs and any other fellow herbivore as competition for the same resources who must also be eliminated. Protecting the herd is more important to them than any individual life. During the attempt by The Alliance Space Marines to take the crippled bear-cow superbattleship, thousands of bear-cow crewmembers hurl themselves at the marines without regard. Any of them who are wounded are finished off by their own comrades in order to spare them from being eaten alive by the predators (they assume any predator, including humans, wants to eat them). For the same reason, any bear-cow taken alive will kill itself through a naturally-developed method of stopping higher brain functions rather than be eaten alive. They don't bother talking to anyone to find out if they will be actually eaten.
• Martin Beck:
  • The culprits in The Man on the Balcony and The Laughing Policemen both try to commit suicide after being caught rather than face prison, public disgrace, and the potential loss of their respective loved ones' affection. Both times, the detectives stop them (with considerably less sympathy in the latter book, given the greater magnitude of that killer's crimes).
  • In The Fire Engine that Disappeared, a Professional Killer is sent to murder three criminals over a bit of Blackmail Backfire. He kills his first target easily, but that man's disappearance and the way the assassin is conspicuously looking for them make the other two men commit suicide rather than wait to die. Unfortunately, the assassin doesn't learn of the second man's death before setting off a fire bomb at the man's apartment, killing three other people.
• "The Mayors": At the climax, Prince Regent Wienis turns his blaster on himself and commits suicide rather than allow himself to be subjected to a religious trial for trying to attack the "holy planet" of Terminus, and also because he can't kill a force-shielded Salvor Hardin with the gun either.
• In The Mirage, Donald Rumsfeld decides that he'd rather take poison than be subjected to capture and torture by Al Qaida.
• In Mockingjay, all characters in the rebel army are fitted with a "Nightlock" capsule and expected to kill themselves before they are captured and taken in for torture/questioning.
• In A More Personal Union, the Chinese Emperor and his sons all kill themselves rather than be captured by the utterly insane revolutionary Red Tiger.
• New Deal Coalition Retained: When the PLA rebels against, and ultimately overthrows, the Chinese Communist Party, Premier Li Peng shoots himself rather than be taken prisoner and executed.
• New Jedi Order:
  • In Star by Star, Viqi Shesh walks off the top of a Coruscant skyscraper rather than surrender herself to those who she betrayed.
  • In the same book, President Fey'lya goes from Sleazy Politician to Doomed Moral Victor by suicide-nuking a couple of divisions of the Scary Dogmatic Aliens who're coming to arrest and/or torture-maim-kill him, while receiving their colonel behind his own desk in his own office, no less.
• In the Newsflesh world, most whose job involves facing zombies make it a rule to save a bullet for themselves, rather than be killed or converted by a zombie mob.
• Every single surviving human being in Australia in On the Beach chooses to take cyanide pills, distributed for this purpose by the government, rather than suffer death by radiation sickness.
• In the Paladin of Shadows book A Deeper Blue, one terrorist kills himself than be taken alive.
• In the Paradox Trilogy, when Devi is besieged by xith'cal aboard one of their tribe ships, she counts her ammunition so that she can save her last bullet for herself, as the xith'cal are known practitioners of To Serve Man and shooting herself would be preferable to being eaten. Fortunately, a rescuer arrives to help just as she presses her gun to her head.
• Quarters: Pjerin's evil aunt Olina chooses to thrust herself on his sword rather than be beheaded for treason.
• In the Queen's Thief series, Eugenides is unable to kill himself, but he asks his father to strangle him rather than survive in the Queen of Attolia's prison. Justified, as she cut off his hand the last time he was prisoner there. The attempt is prevented. On another occasion, he refuses to jump off a cliff because he's chained to two innocent men, both of whom are willing to die with him, who will be able to survive and see their families again.
• Happens in Romance of the Three Kingdoms. When Guan Yu is captured and executed, his two surviving subordinates, Zhou Cang and Wang Fu, both commit suicide before Maicheng finally falls.
• In the fourth Safehold book, A Mighty Fortress, Hauwerd Wylsynn decides it's better to be killed than horribly tortured to death by the Inquisition. When the Inquisition finally makes its move, Wylsynn murders his brother (who was going to face his punishment honorably) and then takes on the Church Guardsmen sent to arrest him. He takes down four armed and armored men before finally being cut down.
• The Saga of the Jomsvikings: Just as Sigvaldi is turning to flight from the Battle of Hjorunga Bay, Bui's ship is boarded and Bui gets both his hands cut off at the wrists by Sigmund Brestisson. With his last strength, Bui picks up his two chests of gold with his arm stumps and jumps overboard while calling on his remaining men to do the same.
• The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System: Ren Zha Fanpai Zijiu Xitong: Shen Qingqiu believes that Luo Binghe is coming to kill him as revenge for pushing him into the Abyss. In order to avoid this fate, he grows a backup body and commits suicide by self-detonating his own golden core.
• At the end of the Dale Brown novel Sky Masters, the Big Bad Admiral Yin, seeing that his plan is foiled, chooses to blow his brains out rather than return to China in defeat, where he will be humiliated and dishonourably executed.
• Generally averted with Space Marine Battles, as Space Marines believe that going down fighting is the only fate worthy a Space Marine. However, one example plays it straight, as one character realizes that Fate Worse than Death awaits him and commits suicide by taking rebreather off in the middle of poisonous fog.
• Dayna Jurgens in The Stand. It comes close for her: she attempted to jump through some glass, but Flagg caught her before she could fall to her death. Thinking quickly, she whipped her head around and sliced her throat on some of the broken glass before he could pull her all the way back in. That he could not foresee or prevent this really rattles him.
• In one Star Trek Expanded Universe novel, Praetor Tal'aura (the senator from Star Trek: Nemesis) finds out that a member of an important Romulan family has been plotting behind her back. When captured, he requests to take poison in lieu of a public execution, knowing that the latter will bring great shame to his family. She denies the coward. Later on, she allows a political rival, who was attempting to incite a revolt against her, to drink poison, having respect for the man. Given that Romulans are, essentially, the Roman Empire Recycled In SPACE, this makes sense.
• In The Stormlight Archive, when the Soulcasting savant Kaza realizes that she's been fatally poisoned, she uses the last of her power to transmute her body into smoke. Having spent her entire life in a Gilded Cage, she hugely values her freedom, even if only in choosing the manner of her death — and in denying her killer the priceless artifact she's holding.
• Averted in the final Timeline-191 book, In at the Death. The dictator ruling the Confederate States of America, Jake Featherston, escapes Richmond and attempts to fly over now-occupied Georgia, hoping to lead guerrilla warfare against the United States in Texas. His plane is shot down, and he is found and killed by Black partisans.
• In Arthur C. Clarke's short story "The Transit of Earth", after his mission is completed the main character faces a slow death marooned on Mars, but ultimately elects to travel to a part of the planet where life has been detected, and allow himself to be consumed by those organisms so his body will remain part of a natural ecosystem.
• Two Kinds of Truth: It's stated that "More inmates died of suicide than the needle on death row in California".
• Defied in the Vorkosigan Saga book Memory, in which the villain is denied the opportunity for suicide after he's caught.
• The Warrior Cats: A Vision of Shadows book Thunder and Shadow features a bonus scene in the Barnes and Noble edition, in which Needlepaw (prior to us meeting her in the series) is picked up and carried off by an owl. She decides she'd rather die by falling (by her own choice) than let it kill and eat her, so she fights until it lets go (and survives the fall).
• In the Westmark trilogy, Zara combines this with Suicide by Cop. Injured and helpless, facing arrest and interrogation, she deliberately taunts the soldiers arresting her and Theo until one of them kills her.
• The Wheel of Time:
  • In The Eye of the World, Perrin, Egwene, and Elyas are being pursued by an immense flock of demonically possessed ravens and suspect they can't reach safety in time. When they do escape, Elyas finds Perrin about to throw his axe into a pond, as he was considering killing himself and Egwene with it rather than allow them to be eaten alive. He asks Perrin which death he really thinks she'd have preferred, and Perrin decides to keep the axe.
  • Also, in The Gathering Storm some inhabitants of Hinderstap town try to commit a suicide in order not to become mindless monsters set to kill each other at every sunset. This doesn't work, anyway.
• In the first Wings of Fire book, Peril is pitted in a life-or-death battle against a dragon named Horizon. Peril always wins her battles because her scales burn to the touch. Realizing that he can't win and that his death will be slow and painful, Horizon decides to grab hold of Peril and burn himself to death quickly.
• In World War Z, there are many of these stories because the book takes place in the aftermath of a Zombie Apocalypse. Most notably, a Russian chaplain decides that he and the other religious figures should be the ones "sending them to God" and the resultant religious fervor turns the postwar Russia into a theocracy.

---