Suicide, it is said, is the last remaining unresolved philosophical challenge. This week, Nicholas Hughes, the son of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, hanged himself at his home in Alaska. He had been battling depression for a long time. Nicholas was unmarried and without children. Some call it the curse of the Plaths. Sylvia put her head inside an oven in 1963, when Nicholas was barely one. The woman her husband was having an affair with at the time of Sylvia’s death also committed suicide in exactly the same way, six years later.

As 2005 drew to a close, a shocking case of group suicide emerged in Japan. Three men and a woman were found dead on Christmas day in a car parked on the side of a forest road in Tokigawa, Saitama Prefecture. The bodies of seven young people had been discovered in a van in the Saitama mountains to the west of Tokyo on October 12 the previous year.

Both incidents are believed to have been triggered by the meeting of lonely hearts on websites that assist group suicides. Wikipedia informs that the most common method of suicide in such cases is carbon monoxide poisoning achieved by burning charcoal briquettes in grills or stoves within an enclosed area, such as a small sealed room, tent, or car.

Group/mass suicides are not a new phenomenon. The most publicized case in recent memory is of thirty nine people who killed themselves in a hilltop mansion near San Diego, California back in 1997. They believed an alien spaceship was hiding behind the Comet Hale-Bopp and drugged themselves in order to reach it. The victims were self-drugged and then suffocated by other members in a series of suicides over a period of three days. Marshall Applewhite was the leader of the gang, which called itself the Heaven’s Gate cult. He died alongwith the others.

The deliberate, planned suicide has long been lauded in literature. Japanese playwright Yukio Mishima painstakingly prepared for his suicide for over a year — an act that was arguably connected to his political motives.

In literary fiction, the pull of suicide is celebrated as a gentle force that calls to its adherents in moments of epiphany. When Mrs. Dalloway walks down Bond Street one morning, the sight of people doing normal things–buying flowers, jaywalking, taking kids to school–overwhelms her. What if all this were to carry on without me, she ponders. The world will keep moving, and this realization, in the middle of a busy thoroughfare, is no less than a shock to her. A little later, her thoughts leading naturally to their final destination, she says to herself, simply, without irony: “It is possible to die.”

Years later, when Laura Brown (from The Hours) is reading Mrs Dalloway and comes across this passage, the glassy clarity of the words pierces her, and she succumbs to their spooky pull–leading to unintended consequences that will play out over many decades.

Virginia Woolf isn’t the only writer who induces suicidal feelings in readers. Sample this from David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas:

The lovelorn, the cry-for-helpers, all mawkish tragedians who give suicide a bad name are the idiots who rush it, like amateur conductors. A true suicide is a paced, disciplined certainty. People pontificate, “Suicide is Selfishness.” Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call it a cowardly assault on the living. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what’s selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends and enemies a bit of soul-searching…

…Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools and states, you find indelible truths at one’s core. Rome’ll decline and fall again, Cortes’ll lay Tenochititlan to waste again, and later, Ewing will sail again, Adrian’ll be blown to pieces again, you and I’ll sleep under Corsican stars again, I’ll come to Bruges again, fall in and out of love with Eva again, you’ll read this letter again, the sun’ll grow cold again. Nietzsche’s gramophone record. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternity.

-Robert Frobisher, Letters from Zedelghem