Suicide Ghost Motif Essay

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There are many motifs that can be analyzed in ghost literature and folklore, though one that is ever present throughout the beginning of the telling of ghost stories is the motif of the suicide ghost. This ghost manifests after the untimely demise of an individual who takes their own life. This motif is intriguing, because of its complex nature and the fact that this motif persists through time, as it is seen in early ghost stories to the most recent accounts of ghosts. The suicide victim is often seen as returning as a ghost, because of the idea that these victims have unfinished business and internal turmoil. The suicide ghost motif persists because of the fascination of the premature death, along with the idea of understanding the internal turmoil one feels that leads them to take one’s own life and how that relates back to one’s own struggles. The suicide ghost motif appears throughout history, since …show more content…
Finucane shows examples of the suicide ghost motif in his work Ghosts: Appearances of the Dead & Cultural Transformation, where he examines ghostlore from its early beginnings of its written record to the twentieth century. One example of this motif is a story set in the 1500s where a woman is haunted by the ghost of her stepmother who committed suicide by drowning herself. The woman attempted to ignore the spirit, before finally hearing her stepmothers plea for pilgrimage for her soul as she “drowned herself of unsound mind” (103). This story exemplifies the suicide ghost motif and the relation of the internal struggle one can suffer from. In the story, the stepmother was of unsound mind when she drowned herself so she was not automatically damned to hell, which showcases the struggle of mind that people have battled for many centuries. The story can relate to mental illness that plagues many people in from beginning in the early ages. Thus, this story relates to the human constant of internal turmoil or mental illness that transcends across the

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