The Murder of Nicholas Scoby

Gunnar Kaufman is either the most naive person on the planet Earth or the worst friend there. Let me explain. All of the hints were there. Scoby nearly tells him outright what he plans to do. But Gunnar, the fool that he is, doesn't seem to get the fact that Scoby is about to kill himself. Scoby calls himself the forty-eighth ronin and makes several references to suicide. He asks Gunnar if he's serious about riling everybody up to off themselves. He explicitly asks whether or not you need a permit to kill yourself (notwithstanding the obvious difficulties of enforcing such a permit). He even tells Gunnar where he plans to jump by asking where the tallest building around is. So why doesn't Gunnar do anything?

Gunnar elsewhere says about the people who are killing themselves in his honor, "But I don't feel responsible for anything anyone else does. I have enough trouble being responsible for myself" (201). Certainly, he's not putting the gun into anybody's hand; he's not holding their family hostage to force them to kill themselves. But, to say that he is not responsible at all is ridiculous. The man is actively inciting others to commit suicide; he dares them to write poems before they go to be more memorable. Innocence here would be to say nothing. Innocence here would under no condition be to triple dog dare everybody to stab themselves and sign his name in their blood with the poem.

But why doesn't Gunnar even think about saving Scoby? It's not like he's willing himself to die; despite talk about taking away the satisfaction of killing him from the government or whoever, he doesn't commit suicide but instead challenges them directly to come and kill him, going against what he explicitly tells Psycho Loco he won't do: "So it's useless for an enemy to challenge you, right? ... Might as well kill myself, right? Why give you the satisfaction" (226). His only reaction after Scoby's talk about suicide and even his actual death is to take notes for a poem and to wonder what noise his body made as it hit the pavement. All Scoby can rouse out of Gunnar is unhappiness that there wasn't a glory to accompany Gunnar's pitiful Brocken specter as he sat at the top of the law building.

The truth is, Gunnar is a huge chicken. He's letting everyone down by not even killing himself, just going through the motions of life. Depression is a funny thing; it's not entirely household knowledge, but antidepressants unexpectedly raise a patient's rate of suicide. This may seem absurd, but the reason is surprisingly simple: those who are depressed don't always even have the emotional strength to consider offing themselves. The drugs make things just good enough that this option returns to the table. It's certainly possible that Gunnar is now very seriously depressed. He doesn't like playing basketball anymore, dismissing the idea that his "purpose in life is to make these free throws, then run back and play defense" (190). At his South Africa speech, he says, "Matter of fact, I ain't ready to die for anything, so I guess I'm just not fit to live. In other words, I'm just ready to die. I'm just ready to die" (200).

Yet even though he goes to such length to describe how he wants to die, there's no sign he's actively trying to kill himself. For an unafflicted reader, depression isn't a compelling enough reason to feel sympathy when the patient is still encouraging others to do the thing he can't. Refusing to talk to Scoby seriously when he most needed it doomed him to death. But, Gunnar still comes out alive, and that's more than he seems to deserve by the end of the novel.