Do Not Go Gentle / Literature

Do Not Go Gentle moments in Literature.

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• Animorphs:
  • Visser One states that this is a racial trait of humans. Most other species out there will give up and surrender if they know there's no hope. Humans, however, keep fighting anyway. Most of the Yeerks think this is basically pointless, but Visser One is savvy enough to know that this will make conquering humanity much more difficult... and is disturbed at the implications about the human psyche it raises.
  • Prince Elfangor pulls this off masterfully in the first book. Mortally wounded and facing Visser Three, Elfangor dies on his feet, striking at the Visser with his tail blade even as the Visser morphs into an Antarean Bogg and eats him alive.
• Callahan's Crosstime Saloon: All of the patrons give an epic one to Tom Hauptmann at the end of "The Time Traveller", persuading him that life is worth living.
• We have Ciaphas Cain, THE HERO OF THE IMPERIUM, and also a self-confessed Dirty Coward. When faced with seemingly inevitable death, he sets his chainsword on high determined to take out as many of his opponents as possible before the end.
• The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant gives us Lord Mhoram's Victory. Revelstone is besieged, its supplies dwindling, everyone rapidly approaching the Despair Event Horizon, and Lord Mhoram decides that instead of sitting around waiting for hunger and despair to let Lord Foul's minions just walk in without a fight, all the remaining forces ride out in one final fight. Though almost a last stand, a combination of the surprise of their attack, and other factors happening at the same time cause the siege to be broken.
• Codex Alera:
  • By the fourth book Captain's Fury, the villainous High Lord Kalarus, an archmage in strength, is bedridden after suffering a devastating and crippling injury in the last book. He knows his war against the other Lords and First Lord Gaius Sextus will eventually lead to his defeat, so he crafts one final insane gambit to not go gently. He purposefully angered the spirit of an ancient dormant volcano and bound it to his life. It cannot act on its anger until he dies or Kalarus releases it. His plan is to release the spirit on the thousands of refugees who fled into his city from the tens of thousands of soldiers fighting on the enemy's side coming to lay siege, killing hundreds of thousands in his own personally created pyre. Only because Gaius Sextus got insight of the volcano without using magic and hiking several hundred miles on foot, did this plan fail because Gaius releases the volcano before his soldiers would be in range and be harmed, so only the refugees and people of the city were sacrificed.
  • In Princeps' Fury Gaius Sextus, weak from being in his eighties and his adventure in the above example, does not go gently when he faces the bulk of the Vord army advancing on his capital city. As many of his men fled the city, he stays behind to draw the Vord in and, after turning himself into metal by using advance metalcrafting, he unleashes the dormant volcano under his city, destroying the city and the Vord army and reduces the enemy forces to a mere tithe of their former number.
  • In First Lord's Fury aged High Lord Cereus is not a fighter like Gaius or Kalarus. He loves his family deeply, though. And when the giant monstrous vordbulk is lumbering towards where his last remaining daughter and his dead son's children are hiding, he flies into the maws of the beast and blows himself up with his magic, destroying the creature and saving his family.
• Dive (2003): In the penultimate flashback, Captain Blade murders the crew of the Spanish galleon and sets it on fire for good measure once he has moved the treasure to his own ship. He missed at least one Spanish sailor hiding below deck, and as the galleon burns, the Spaniard hurls a firebomb at the Griffin, which sets off a powder explosion and sends Blade and most of his crew to the bottom of the sea.
• In Dragon Bones there is a variant: The protagonists sit all huddled on a hill overseeing their castle, which is just being invaded by the enemy army. Oreg points out that the villains will find the dragon bones, and that will have terrible consequences for everyone in the world. He reminds Ward, that there is a way to stop them. Said way is to kill Oreg. He can persuade Ward to do it, and as soon as Ward drives his dagger into Oreg's brain (the most painless way to kill he knows), the walls of castle Hurog crumble and fall, and the villains are buried under tons of stone.
• The Dresden Files:
  • Harry Dresden, repeatedly and with intent to cause severe property damage. He keeps taking on things fifty times his size and refuses to back down... it's a good thing there are so many badasses watching his back.
    If I was to die, I was not going to go out in a gibbering heap of terror. If I was to die, it wouldn't happen because I was half crippled with fear and Sight trauma.
    If I was to die, it was going to be a bloody and spectacular mess.
  • More generally, this is the exact attitude a large number of wizards take with their Death Curses. Of particular note is late Senior Council member Simon Pietrovich, who didn't take his death lying down when his base is attacked by vampires - instead he made sure he had a lot of company at the Gates. It's not clear exactly how much company, because his death curse hit the area with the magical equivalent of a nuclear strike, wiping out at least the equivalent of an entire Red Court task force.
  • It is believed, but not fully known, that Merlin, the original Myrddin Emrys, followed this idea when it was finally his time.
• Several examples in the Gaunt's Ghosts series by Dan Abnett. Considering the universe they are in, this is hardly surprising. The most notable ones are listed here.
  • In Sabbat Martyr, an entire platoon is left stranded outside the gates of the Civitas Beati on Herodor. With no choice left, they decide to face down the invading Chaos Army until death. They take down roughly ten times their number before finally being overrun.
  Nineteenth Platoon lasted seventeen minutes from the time the gate closed. They accounted for one hundred and eighty-nine enemy casualties. No one witnessed their heroism.
  • In Only in Death, the fuel and munitions supplies the Ghosts desperately need is blown up in their faces by an incredibly unlucky rocket strike. The commanding officer of that operation, Major Rawne, rages and resolves to make the enemy pay dearly for their victory.
    Rawne: Feth! Feth it all! It can't end like this! I won't allow it!
    Kolea: Now what?
    Rawne: We take as many of those bastards down with us. All of them! Every last Emperor-damned one of them!
    Kolea: Just what I was about to say myself.
• Hellboy:
  • Averted in the short story "Far Flew the Boast of Him" by Brian Hodge, published in Hellboy: Odd Jobs: when Grendel returns to life and slaughters a group of English medieval reenactors, he boasts that he gave them the privilege of an "epic" death, the kind most men only dream about; Hellboy privately reflects that in his experience, most men who die by violence do so crying, screaming, crapping their pants and begging for their families, and Hellboy does not see anything the least bit shameful about it.
  • Fulfilled in the short story "Act of Mercy" by Thomas E. Sniegoski, when an aged, decrepit demon kidnaps several children to draw Hellboy to him, wanting to die in "glorious" combat instead of old age; Hellboy obliges him, and even plays along with the demon's self-importance.
• Jade City: The Green Bone clans offer this as a method of execution to a Worthy Opponent: a condemned Green Bone may demand a "death of consequence" and face a full squad of armed opponents in final combat. One side character killed all eight of his executioners and became a minor Living Legend for walking away from his own "death".
• A textbook example of how to do it right can be found at the end of Legend by David Gemmell.
• Little Mushroom: One of the series' central themes is humanity's stubborn refusal to give up in the face of overwhelming odds. Even as the After the End situation becomes more and more hopeless for them, they decide that they still want to keep on fighting for survival even if all their struggles might amount to nothing in the end. The "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" poem is even directly quoted in the text as one of the works that the human base's children are taught as a source of inspiration to never meekly surrender to death.
• The Lord of the Rings:
  • The mindset of the entire cast of heroes. Of course, Plan A is that Frodo destroys the One Ring, but everyone is well aware that the chances of this being successful are slim.
  • In The Two Towers when what's left of the Helm's Deep garrison sallies into Saruman's army purely in the name of glory. (And to give the people of Rohan time to retreat into the Glittering Caves)
  • In the appendices to the trilogy, it is mentioned that Dain Ironfoot, who succeeded Thorin Oakenshield as the King Under the Mountain, was killed in a Last Stand at the gate of the Lonely Mountain, defending his friend King Brand's body from an army loyal to Sauron. Being two hundred and fifty-two years old, none of the dwarves would have blamed him for sitting the battle out, or at least retreating behind the gates when given the opportunity, but not Dain.
• River Marked, in the Mercy Thompson series, has the various Native American Spirits fight as hard as they can while knowing that defeat is inevitable.
• Old Kingdom: In Clariel, the protagonist's mother Jaciel recognizes the Big Bad's plot while she's in his manor, surrounded by dozens of his guards. Despite her shoddy parenting until that point, she orders Clariel to run and then demonstrates that she's not merely a goldsmith but also a Berserker Magic Knight who personally enchanted all of her jewelry, hacking through most of the guards in a Mook Horror Show before someone finally brings her down.
• Pact: Subverted when the protagonist, upon being told that he's fated to die soon by a sphinx, decides to try to do as much good as he can in the time he has left and sets out to slay a bound demon that's in danger of breaking free—only for the demon to eat him, and in the process make him an Unperson, to the extent that even the sphinx's Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory can't remember his name.
• Safehold series gives us the defeat of Alyksberg. With no chance to defend the besieged city from the onrushing Dolahran Army, Siddarmarkians pull back, leaving behind the crippled and wounded, who proceed to blow up the entire city, taking at least a quarter of attackers with them.
• In The Silmarillion, this is the attitude of most Men, since unlike the Elves they can't wait around for eternity in magically-hidden cities in the hope a miracle will happen.
  Turin: Though mortal men have little life beside the span of the Elves, they would rather spend it in battle then fly or submit... though Morgoth slay the doer he cannot make the deed not have been.
• One of the themes of the final book in the Song of the Lioness series. Runaway princess Thayet describes how when faced with a life of imprisonment, her mother's final act was to become a martyr to inspire and protect her people. Alanna feels that this was a useless act, thinking it's always better to live to fight another day. By the end of the book, she understands the importance of this trope, after Liam undergoes a Heroic Sacrifice of this nature to save the kingdom.
• A running theme throughout The Stone Angel, by Margaret Laurence. The main character, Hagar Shipley, is over ninety and dying, but she's not prepared to go just yet. Sections of the Trope Namer poem are quoted in the text.
• In The Trials of Apollo Jason Grace goes out in a Dying Moment of Awesome basically stalling Caligula in the third book so the rest of them could escape.
  • Frank does this in the end of book four, to the worry of everyone else. It turns out it was prophesied that the only way to stop the Triumvirate was for him to literally go out in a blaze of glory, by burning the stick that held his life. He lives by choosing his own fate
• In Twig, the Crown and the Academy are so unassailable that any rebellion against them essentially boils down to this, whether it's Reverend Mauer, rogue experiments or failed Academy students who know they no longer have any future worth living for. Genevieve Fray is the only rebel who actually has a long-term plan, and that involves flirting with the very real possibility of global extinction to get to a position where she might be able to actually change the status quo.
  • When Sylvester and Jamie eventually rebel, their knowledge of their own expiration dates being mere months into the future mean they decide to attempt both of the outcomes in the trope description; live their short lives to the full, while doing everything they can to inconvenience the Crown and Academy, since they don't really think they have a chance of actually toppling the institutions.
  • One of many reasons that the deaths of Gordon and the first Jamie are so heartbreaking is because they don't get the chance to do this. Despite being as willing to fight to the last as any other Lamb, the biological weaknesses they've had programmed into them by the Academy mean they don't get to go on The Last Dance with their friends, and die helplessly and uselessly.
• Will in Scarlet: Cruel-hearted scumbag he may be, the witnesses to Gilbert's death respectfully agree that he went down fighting hard against Guy's men.
• In Worm, the Undersiders decide to do this after failing to stop the end of the world. They talk over their priorities a little first.
  Canary: This is us? We're whiling away the time until the world ends? Giving up like everyone else?
  Tattletale: What? No. Fuck no.
  Imp: No. Wait, did anyone think that? Because I was thinking this was more us trying to decide what the hell we need to do before we throw ourselves into one final, suicidally reckless attack.
  Taylor: Basically. Minus the suicidally reckless part. There's other stuff we can try first. But yeah. I think we're mostly on the same page here.
  Bitch: Go out fighting.
  Tattletale: Go out fighting.
  Taylor: Nothing held back. Right. I'll need my stuff.
  • On the villain side of things, Bonesaw has herself rigged with horrific Tinker-made plagues ready to be deployed upon her death.
    • Bakuda similarly maintains has rigged bombs to do much the same in the event of her death, though on a smaller scale than Bonesaw.
    • Also, in Arc 26, when Jack Slash is caught in Grey Boy's time loops his last act is to convince Scion to give up good deeds and find his purpose in the destruction instead.

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