Suicide is justice. It is vindication.

In the Antigone, suicide is a justice as imperative against injustice that Antigone knows well and Creon learns too late.

Suicide visits upon the unjust, with Creon’s final words: “Lead me away, a vain silly man … I do not know where to turn my eyes to look for support. Everything in my hands is crossed. A most unwelcome fate has leaped upon me.”[1]

In the study of suicide notes, [2] Bjerg reports phrases such as:

“You will suffer a lot for just what you have done to me.”

“You will know, after I am gone, that I spoke the truth.”

“I hope you have my last breath on your mind forever.”

“I hope that each time you pass a cemetery you will have memories of one his is there.”

Martyrs such as Perpetua and Ignatius warrant that vindication for persecution in this life will be in paradise. Tertullian confirms that: “No city escaped punishment that had shed Christian blood.”[3]

In Crime and Custom in Savage Society, Malinowski describes suicide among the Trobrianders as a “complex embracing the desire of self-punishment, revenge, re-habilitation, and sentimental grievance.” Accused of incest, Kima’i, a boy of sixteen, suicides in one of the traditional ways: leaping from the top of a coconut tree.

Next morning he put on festive attire and ornamentation, climbed a coco-nut palm and addressed the community, speaking from among the palm leaves and bidding them farewell. He explained the reasons for his desperate deed and also launched forth a veiled accusation against the man who had driven him to his death, upon which it became the duty of his clansmen to avenge him. Then he wailed aloud, as is the custom, jumped from a palm some sixty feet high and was killed on the spot.[4]

< § >

—
[1] Antigone, 1415.
[2] Bjerg, “The Suicidal Life: Attempts at a Reconstruction from Suicide Notes,” 485.
[3] Cited by John Donne, Biathantos, 23.
[4] Malinowski, Crime and Custom in Savage Society.