Kit Harrington as Jon Snow in Game of Thrones (IMDB)

The End of Endings; or, Why Won’t Anyone Stay Dead?


In 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle famously killed off Sherlock Holmes in his story “The Final Problem”. Doyle intended to write, as he put it, “better things”, but fans hounded him into bringing the detective back, first in The Hound of the Baskervilles, set before “The Final Problem”, and then permanently. It turned out that the final problem was not death, but staying dead.

Retroactively, of course, Doyle was able to explain that Holmes did not really die. But does any fictional character? Even taking death within the story at face value, with the possibilities — relied on far more now than in Doyle’s day — of reboots, sequels, prequels, time travel, multiverses, clones, or resurrection, no one needs to stay dead for long. When Aslan dies and is resurrected in C.S. Lewis’s 1950 novel, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the adult reader recognizes the beast as a Christian allegory, since only Christ—or a suitably Christian surrogate—can come back from the dead. Yet by the ’80s, following Holmes’ lead, every character who died during the film’s climax, from alien ET to robot Johnny Five in Short Circuit, managed, after the audience cried, to come back for the resolution. Even as recently as 1992, DC Comics still managed to persuade the world that Superman was dead. Spoiler alert: He wasn’t.


In what was the TV pop cultural event of 2016, Game of Thrones‘ Jon Snow, seemingly dead at the end of Season 5, and not seemingly but really, really dead in the premiere of Season 6, was brought back to life. Given 2016’s cultural landscape with barely a single undisturbed grave, his return should not have surprised anyone. Consider: Bucky Barnes, dead in Captain America: First Avenger, back in the sequel as the eponymous Winter Soldier; Captain Kirk, dead and back in Star Trek: Into Darkness, when in the ’80s Mr. Spock had to wait a whole movie sequel for his resurrection; Cyclops and Jean Grey, killed in X-Men: The Last Stand (spoiler alert: it wasn’t) but brought back through a rewritten timeline in X-Men: Days of Future Past; Nick Fury and Commissioner Gordon and Pepper Potts, all dead in their respective movies (Winter Soldier, Dark Knight, and Iron Man III), but then, quickly, their deaths revealed as ploys.






The nature of the character in a novel cannot be presented any better than is done in this statement, which says that the “meaning” of his life is revealed only in his death. But the reader of a novel actually does look for human beings from whom he derives the “meaning of life.” Therefore he must, no matter what, know in advance that he will share their experience of death: if need be their figurative death—the end of the novel—but preferably their actual one. How do the characters make him understand that death is already waiting for them—a very definite death and at a very definite place? That is the question which feeds the reader’s consuming interest in the events of the novel.


Or, as Frank Kermode, in his seminal book The Sense of an Ending (Oxford UP, new ed., 2000) understands it, endings help readers make sense not just of their own lives, but their place in history. Stories are not just dress rehearsals for death, but they are inextricably linked to etiological and apocalyptic sensibilities: “Fictions,” Kermode says, “whose ends are consonant with origins satisfy our needs.” The conventions of story dictate a beginning and an ending; for every “Once upon a time,” a “Happily ever after.” Kermode goes on to suggest that “one has to think of an ordered series of events which ends, not in a great New Year, but in a final Sabbath.” The endings of all stories become the endings of all things: narrative ending as a death, but also death as a narrative ending: “the End is a fact of life and a fact of the imagination” (58). But without character deaths or endings, what happens to Benjamin’s comfort or Kermode’s closure? Without Happily Ever After—or unhappily ever after, for that matter—readers are left only with a grim, relentless Middle—just like our own real lives.


Before Batman v Superman, before his 1992 almost fatal fight with Doomsday, Superman died before, in a 1961 comic billed as an “imaginary story”. Then he died again, figuratively, in Alan Moore’s 1986 preparation of DC’s character reboot. Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? (DC Comics, 1986) opened with this preface, which reads, in part: “This is an imaginary story (which may never happen, but then again may) about a perfect man who came from the sky did only good. It tells of his twilight…of how his enemies conspired against him… and how finally all the things he had were taken from him save for one.” In comics, the “imaginary story” takes place outside of cannon and continuity; like time travel, multiverses, and resurrection, it’s an existential mulligan, or maybe an alibi—it’s just a story. But I think Moore, in likening Superman to Jesus Christ no less than CS Lewis likens Aslan, means the opposite: stories matter, not despite that they’re imaginary, but precisely because they are.

Superman, of course, did not die. But then again, no fictional character really does. Perhaps the fictional prototype is less Sherlock Holmes, first written in 1887, than his contemporary Peter Pan, who debuted in 1902. Legend of Zelda’s Link looks a lot like Peter Pan. But it’s not just the pointy ears and pointy weapons, the green clothes, the shock of hair. Like all video game characters, and like Peter Pan, Link is, in essence, immortal and eternally youthful. You could make the same case for all fictional characters—that they revert to being alive and, if applicable, young when you start the book, movie, or game again. As a father, no sentence weighs heavier on my heart than when one of my kids tells me, once game time is over, that “I’ll just play until I die.” “I” die, not “Link dies” or “my game ends”.
