Written by Nanda Illahi
Abstract
“Perhaps we should end this now, you’ve done enough,” said the lady inside my head. How often can a person have a debate with their inner lions? I can practically hear the sound of the existential crisis eating me alive. If I take my own life, everyone will say, I’m evil. If I don’t, I will think everybody else is evil. There is really no in-between. In a journey of finding the meaning of “suicide,” this paper involves a debate between oneself and the society that does not listen. Building upon the works of sociologists and anthropologists, I take a detour of the notion of suicide and the agency of the person committing the act.
“Have you ever thought of giving up on life because it’s too hard to keep living? If you have the choice to end your suffering by killing yourself, would you?” I asked myself these questions as I walked in the midst of what seemed to be an unending winter.
The smell of the rain that had just stopped along with the hard blows of cold breeze on my reddened cheeks accompanied my lonely adventure to an existential crisis. As a lost wanderer, not knowing where to go, I dared myself to hop on an anonymous train. I asked myself once more, “Do I even have a choice in dying?”
“Man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door and run away,” said Socrates.
Plato in Noon 1978, p. 373
Montaigne says, “The wise man lives as long as he ought, not so long as he can…” (Noon 1978, p. 378) illustrating that death is a choice of the one living the life, not the God or Nature who gives it nor the society it lives in. But is this true?
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The Polyphony 