17 2014

papyrus residing in the Berlin Museum and is believed to date from around 2000 BC; it consists, in part, of a narrative describing a debate about death between the unknown author and his own soul, and it has been claimed that the four poems which follow this are indicative of a severely depressed or psychotic individual. Since then, many famous and indeed infamous suicides have been accompanied by notes – of these, my favourite (if that is the word) is Kodak founder George Eastman’s somewhat blunt ‘To my friends: my work is done. Why wait? GE’. Commonly, suicide victims of significant stature, for example in politics or the military, have used their note as a final personal manifesto to articulate and address the issues or grievances which led them to kill themselves, or to condemn their worldly oppressors; as such, they have used this last opportunity to effectively create a final work of prose literature.Conversely,many works of literature have included suicide notes as plot devices for ostensibly tragic purposes, such as in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure or in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. However, few writers have gone so far as to write an entire work as a fictional suicide note. The most notable and lengthy exception is Martin Amis’ 1984 novel Money: A Suicide Note , which ends with a first-person account of deliberately overdosing on scotch and tranquilizers, although as evident in the epilogue, the ‘suicide’ of the title is more of a metaphorical loss of self and identity; the overdose attempt fails, and throughout the novel it is banknotes which are referred to as ‘suicide notes’. The protagonist of ‘The Final Note’, on the other hand, mentions no motive for suicide; the reader is given no indication of the narrator’s background, identity or even gender, and does not even realise until most of the way through the piece that suicide is the promised end. The piece is therefore intended not as a fictitious note from some specific individual but as an attempt to set down the hypothetical thoughts of someone, of any demographic or

17 96

Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker