History TearJerker / Literature

* The last chapter of ''[[Literature/WinnieThePooh The House at Pooh Corner]]'' qualifies. Christopher Robin is going away. It's implied he's going to boarding school, which means he won't see his friends again. The characters don't know the specifics, but they band together and write him a goodbye note. As they host a farewell party, Eeyore realizes that the boy wants to be alone with Pooh, telling the others to leave. Christopher Robin then takes Pooh to 'An Enchanted Place, at the Top of the Forest'. They talk together, about doing nothing. Christoper Robin mentions that 'they don't let you do nothing. Not for long, anyway.' He tells Pooh of things he'll learn at school�about countries, Kings and Factors, eventually making him his best, most faithful Knight. Then the ending.

* Literature/BeckyBananasThisIsYourLife. It's sad enough with the main character being a LittlestCancerPatient, but when you read the very last page and discover that she has died just 3 months before her 12th birthday, meaning that she never gets to go to Disneyland, something that she had really wanted to do...
* ''The Bobiverse''
** ''Literature/WeAreLegionWeAreBob''
** ''Literature/ForWeAreMany''
** ''Literature/AllTheseWorlds''
* "There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can't fix it you've got to stand it." - ''Brokeback Mountain''.

* ''The Cat Who Went to Heaven'' by Elizabeth Coatsworth tells the story of a Japanese artist commissioned to paint a portrait of the Buddha's funeral procession, and ultimately defies convention by including an image of his beloved pet cat, Good Fortune, among the animals. Upon seeing this act of love, Good Fortune promptly dies of joy. The temple officials initially reject the painting, but recant after viewing it the next day to find the cat in the painting is no longer in its place among the animals, but resting on the Buddha's breast receiving a blessing from him.
* Tomie [=DePaola=]'s ''The Clown of God'', a retelling of an old legend. A talented, traveling juggler is taken for granted as he ages. He chooses to give up his act when he fails his signature routine (7 balls, including a golden one) and is cruelly mocked and run out of town by a mob. Christmas Eve comes and he seeks shelter in a church. He witnesses visitors leaving little gifts at the feet of a statue of the Madonna and her Child. Once everyone has left he notices how stern the Child looks, even with all the gifts, so he decides to perform his entire act for him, full costume and all. He does it better than he ever has before, but during the climax with the 7 balls, he dies of a heart attack. The monks, who had been alerted to the "sacrilege" going on, find the poor fellow dead and one says "May he rest in peace" - and then they notice the Child is smiling, and is holding the golden ball. The [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL8d20-YxPg Weston Woods animated version]] with Creator/BorisKarloff narrating handles this particularly well.
* In ''Drums of Autumn'', the split second in the prison with Bree and Stephen Bonnet where it looks like StraightGay sidekick and Bree's fiancee Lord John's just been murdered, the building's about to explode and to top it all Bree's about to go into premature labor...
** In ''A Breath of Snow and Ashes,'' just before Roger and Brianna are about to take their two children back to the future, Jamie says to Jem: "If one day, ''a bhailach''... ye should meet a verra large mouse named Michael - ye'll tell him your grandsire sends his regards."

* Jane Langton's ''The Fledgeling'' really ought to be a perfect storm of {{Narm}} (it involves a WaifProphet little girl who might be the reincarnation of Henry David Thoreau, a not-subtle GreenAesop, and a character referred to as the Goose Prince for crying out loud) and yet it's a tear jerker.
* Frank Peretti: ''Monster''. The whole premise of the book is somewhat heartbreaking, but the ending is so bittersweet it burns.
** While we're on the subject of Frank Peretti, the ending of ''Hangman's Curse'' and every single chapter of the auto-biographical ''No More Victims''-both featuring anti-bullying themes.
** The sequel to ''Hangman's Curse'', ''Nightmare Academy'', has some absolutely heartwrenching scenes dealing with the twins separation from their parents and everything else they know, the parents' search for the kidnapped twins, and Elijah slowly going insane in the titular academy. It can be especially bad if the reader has lost someone very close to him or her.

---> Looking at him, a picture of health and contentment, my mind went back to his mother. Was it too much to think that that dying little creature with the last of her strength had carried her kitten to the only haven of comfort and warmth she had ever known in the hope that it would be cared for there? Maybe it was.

* ''Give a Boy a Gun'' by Todd Strasser. The fact that a book like this could even be ''written'' as a verisimilitude is enough to make some people cry.

* Tearjerker/TheGreatGatsby

* Cecilia Ahern's ''If You Could See Me Now'', the parts told from Ivan's point of view. He loves Elizabeth but he's a professional imaginary friend and can never age, or die. Then she loses the ability to see him.

* ''Ink & Steel'' starts punching one in the tear ducts at about the point of Will and Kit hooking up, and never really stops.
* Anyone who's read a James Herriot book will know that tearjerker stories are spaced throughout, with material such as a young dog being put to sleep because she had incurable mange and an old bed-ridden woman trying to take care of her animals. Even the happy ones can cause rivers of tears, with [[http://books.google.com/books?id=_shkeDMFKt8C&pg=PA65&lpg=PA65&dq=james+herriot+roy&source=web&ots=hEDa2vnt0m&sig=uK_j6aMocVpArY-_HK3ZlavNnbs&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result=9&ct=result#PPA57,M1 "Mrs. Donovan"]] (the story itself is on page 57).

* ''Johnno'' by David Malouf has one toward the end. Throughout the book, we see Johnno as a drunken, dangerous fool constantly holding the far more sensible and rational Dante back. Then, after Johnno's (implied) suicide, Dante finds a letter from Johnno that makes it clear that Johnno is a loyal and devoted friend who has been repeatedly let down, betrayed and ignored by the aloof Dante. What makes it even more heartbreaking is that it's generally believed to be semi-autobiographical, with Dante being Malouf.

* The end of ''Messenger''. Ahh, Matty ...
* F. X. Toole's short story, "Million Dollar Baby", especially the last line.

* The ending of ''Pegasus'' by Creator/RobinMcKinley.
* Creator/RayBradbury's short story "There Will Come Soft Rains" It's so eerie, too...

* The first book in ''Remnants''. In the first half of the book, we're told that the Earth has less than a week to survive. To drive the point in, the main character Jobs, who is trying to get tickets on a ship off the doomed planet for his parents, himself, and his girlfriend, is treated to news footage off of her phone of a fragment of the deadly meteor breaking off and ''killing her entire family''. And there were ''thirteen books'' of this series.
* ''Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes'': The book is the story of a girl named Sadako Sasaki, who lived in Hiroshima during the time of American's bombing of the cities and developed leukaemia from the radiation of the atomic bombs, who spends her time in a nursing home attempting to make a thousand origami cranes, which supposedly would grant her the ability to make one wish, which is to live. The entire book is a tear-jerker, especially the ending, in which she eventually dies, having only created 644 cranes, and becoming too weak to fold any more. Think that's bad? Well, guess what? It was based on a true story.

* The funeral program at the conclusion of ''The Salmon of Doubt''
** The end of ''So Long And Thanks For All The Fish'': "I think I feel good about it."

* Matthew Reilly's ''Scarecrow'' has a nasty one, where the antagonist guillotines the main character's girlfriend. Her last words are these- "Tell him I would have said yes". Shane, the main character, recognises this as being a reference to his upcoming proposal of marriage.

* Jerry Spinelli's ''Stargirl'', particularly the ending. The sequel is just as heartwrenching.

* ''Where the Red Fern Grows'' has many tear-jerking moments, even before the end. If only all dogs were like that... Especially the part where Dan gets his guts ripped out by a mountain lion, and then they're hanging out of his body.

* ''Literature/GenerationKill.''

* The very end of ''The Incredible Journey'', when the three animals all end their journey together.
* ''Before I Die''. Especially the last few pages.

* Everything written by Douglas Coupland has multiple examples of this.
* In ''The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen'' by M.T. Anderson, the moment Katie realizes that, as a fictional character she will never age, never go to college, never get married, and eventually becoming just as much an anachronism as her friend Jasper Dash, a Tom Swift style character, as her friend Lily leaves her behind.

* Kazuo Ishiguro's ''Never Let Me Go'' in which you come to realize that the main character Kathy and her friends are clones created to provide spare organs for "normal" people and indoctrinated to believe their only goal in life is to be "donors". At the end of the book, Kathy has seen her best friend and her lover die after giving away several of their organs... and as if that wasn't enough of a Tearjerker already, she accepts that in a few years, the same thing will happen to her. She ''could'' refuse, run away and try to stop what's happening, because she's allowed to drive and do everything other people do... but ''the thought doesn't even occur to her''. When the time comes, she'll drive herself to the slaughterhouse.

** By the same author, ''The Remains of the Day'' and the concluding realisation that the main character has wasted his chance of getting together with the woman he loved.
* The final meeting between Audrey and Piccadilly's ghost in the Literature/DeptfordMice books.

* The last few chapters of Stephen King's ''It''.
* The moment in Stephen King's ''The Shining'' where Jack Torrance briefly shakes off his possession to tell his son that he loves him.
* Alaska's death and its immediate aftermath, halfway through John Green's ''Looking For Alaska''

* "The Outsiders" - when Johnny dies.

* Barbara Park's ''Mick Harte Was Here''.
* The major situation in ''The Cold Equations''. Even if it ''is'' the result of plotholes you could drive a truck through.
* Patrick Rothfuss's ''The Name of the Wind'' has this several times, most strongly when you realize the main character somehow lost everything - his music, his magic, his best friends, his glory - and in the epilogue, when the line "if there had been music... but of course, there was no music" takes on a full meaning. It doesn't help that the epilogue and the prologue are nearly identical; re-reads will also drive that point home.

* Terhune's ''Bruce'' has this in the second to last chapter. Poor Bruce.

* In Mary Stewart's ''Merlin'' books, there's a passage about Uther's sudden death at a feast and the ensuing furore over the succession, and there's one paragraph. The dead king is sitting in his chair going stiff and cold, "with no man looking his way, save only Ulfin [his most loyal servant], who was weeping."

* ''The Paul Street Boys'': Nemecsek's death.

* ''Nuestras Sombras'' (Our Shadows) by Maria Teresa Budge. PluckyGirl Patricia and all of her difficulties...

* ''The Boy in the Striped Pajamas''. Bruno's father realizes his own son was gassed, and the last line provokes even more.

* Narration from Septimus' mind in ''Mrs. Dalloway'' by Creator/VirginiaWoolf. He volunteered in World War I. He watched his friend, Evans, be blown to pieces. The war destroyed his humanity and he died on the inside. He can't feel anything anymore. He suffers from hallucinations of Evans. In all likelihood, he's probably schizophrenic. Finally, Septimus ends it all by committing suicide.

* Tim Lott's ''Fearless" is about around 1000 girls, mostly orphans, mentally unwell or criminals, who live in what they call the Institute, which is actually called the "City Community Faith School For Retraining, Opportunity and Hope. Throughout the novel, the protagonist, Little Fearless, escapes the Institute and attempts to make the real situation known, until she is caught and finally dies.

* Larka's death in ''The Sight'', with the way it played out, and later having Kar thinking that Larka had come back, when really it was her lookalike, Slavka. Then, in the next book ''Fell'', the knife of grief is once again plunged in, when it is revealed that Larka survived the fall, - only to have the BigBad of the book come along a short while later and kill her, in order to make a full wolf-pelt coat, seeing as the previous book's BigBad, Morgra (who [[TakingYouWithMe fell with Larka]], but ''didn't'' survive) wasn't enough.

-->I used the knife
-->I saved a child.
-->I won a war.
-->God forgive me.

* Montolio [=DeBrouchee=]'s death in Literature/TheDarkElfTrilogy, the fact that it's a natural death only makes it hit harder.
* When Mr. Crepsley dies in Literature/TheSagaOfDarrenShan.

* The ending of Abraham Merritt's ''Literature/TheMoonPool''. The protagonist has spent the entire book trying to save the population of a mysterious aquatic culture from an evil priestess and her [[EldritchAbomination patron deity]], all the while watching his beloved [[HeterosexualLifePartners Heterosexual Life Partner]] court one of the indigenous women, and this is his reward:

* Bailey's disappearence/implied death, most likely due to having eaten some poison that'd been put down at the ending of ''Kitty'', by William Corlett.

* The Pickett's Charge section of ''The Killer Angels,'' from Armistead's POV.

* In Carol O'Connell's ''The Stone Angel'', SociopathicHero Kathy Mallory goes back to the small Southern town where her mother was killed fifteen-odd years ago... and where her childhood pet dog, who almost died at the same time, is still barely clinging on to life, waiting for his little girl to come back. And it's not just the inevitable conclusion -- the old, old dog crawling to her, believing that he's running as fast as any animal ever has, before collapsing and dying at her feet -- it's that ''Mallory cries over him''.

* Australian author Paul Jennings is probably best known for writing quirky, creepy, funny stories in his short-story anthologies, but in every collection there was one tale that was surprisingly tear-jerking.
** In "Unreal" a boy suffers from the obsessive compulsion to add the words "without a shirt" to the end of every sentence. However, one day his dog starts bringing home pieces of a skeleton that stir a strange sense of sadness in him. He takes it upon himself to find the rest of the bones and reunite them in a single grave, and for hours he beach-combs, trying to complete his task. It turns out that the bones belonged to his great-great grandfather, who was lost at sea and with whom he shares his first name. After putting together the skeleton, he throws an old shirt down into the grave, saying: "don't worry, I won't bury you without a shirt." From that day forth, he never again ends his sentences with those words. It's such a strange, surreal little story, but there is something about the boy's unusual plight, the fact that it was his hard work and diligence broke the words' hold on him, and the understated denouement in which he shouts in triumph to the sky as his dog watches him ("he seemed to be smiling").
** In "Undone" a boy gets lost in the desert trying to find the legendary creature known as the "Wobby Gurgle" for the sake of his father who wants to make his restrooms a famous tourist resort. The boy finds the Wobby Gurgle: a strange little man made entirely out of water, only to find that he's stranded in the desert. The Wobby Gurgle leads him home again, giving him water to drink from his own form, even as it causes him to shrink and waste away. Finally the boy refuses to take any more water from him, but it would seem to be too late... until as the Wooby Gurgle lays dying, another one appears: a female, who kisses him and allows her body of water to flow into him, rendering them both the same size. It sounds ridiculous, but it's beautiful. The boy gets home, and when faced with television crews that could make his father's dream come true, he lies to protect those that saved his life.
** One story concerns a pair of brothers, one who is very sickly, and the other mentally disabled. They live in a part of Australia where it never snows, and due to the sickly brother's medical bills, they cannot travel to a snowy area. The sickly brother's wish is to see it snow, just once, and to see a snowman dance (don't remember it clearly- the dancing may or may not have been part of his wish). The mentally disabled brother has an obsession with toilet paper and collects rolls and rolls of it in his attic room. Near the sickly brother's deathbed, the mentally disabled brother goes berserk and their parents are dreadfully upset and decide to throw away his collection. He steals a jar of honey from the kitchen and locks himself in the attic with his collection before they can do so. While they're trying to get the door unlocked, the sickly brother is looking out his window when he sees snow swirling all over the place, and soon a snowman appears, dancing. It's in fact his brother, who has shredded ''his entire collection'' and thrown it all out the window, and smeared the honey all over himself so he will look like a snowman with the paper clinging to him. He dies happy.
** Yet another story had a street performer who was only loved by his canine companion. Jealous that his audience loves the dog more than him the man threw the dog into a well. During that time it was trapped the dog kept looking up at the tiny hole at the top so that its head was permanently twisted back when the owner finally brought it back up again. The owner then wins the lottery and started to give away money so that everyone will start to like him but when he ran out of money he had to hide in the well to escape from the angry mob and ended up trapped there. He only survived because the dog kept bringing him food and was finally rescued when someone spied the dog's corpse beside the well. The story ends with the man alone and with his head twisted back permanently to stare at the sky.

* ''The Bell Jar'' by Creator/SylviaPlath. The protagonist and AuthorAvatar, Esther Greenwood, undergoes a mental breakdown and becomes suicidal. She half-heartedly attempts suicide by slitting her wrists in the bathtub, but can't bring himself to do it because her pale skin looked so defenseless and what she really wanted to cut at was beneath her skin and then she tries to drown herself in the ocean, but, more or less, the ocean spits her back out. Then she finally goes through with a suicide attempt when she downs a bottle of sleeping pills and hides herself in the basement. The biopic about Plath's life put it best when her mother said, "Some people want to be found; Sylvia didn't."
** Sylvia Plath's journals can have the same effect if you get attached to her after seeing what kind of person she was. Once you read the last of her journals, you may start to cry once the realization hits you that Plath killed herself after her husband left her. She stuck her head in a gas oven and suffocated from the fumes.
** "Lady Lazarus."
--> Soon, soon the flesh\\
The grave cave ate will be\\
At home on me\\

--> And I am a smiling woman.\\
I am only thirty.\\
And like a cat I have nine times to die.\\

--> This is Number Three.\\
What a trash\\
To annihilate each decade.\\

--> The second time I meant\\
To last it out and not come back at all.\\
I rocked shut\\

--> As a seashell.\\
They had to call and call\\
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.\\

--> I do it so it feels like hell.\\
I do it so it feels real.\\
I guess you could say I've a call.

* ''Literature/ATaleOfTwoCities''
* Diane Jessup's ''The Dog Who Spoke with Gods.'' The main character, Elizabeth, attempting to escape with the broken-English speaking pit bull she has bonded with and subsequently freed from a laboratory, is crushed in a lumberyard and dies. In a horrible twist on the "dog dies" cliche, she goes slowly, with the dog by her side, refusing to leave her.

* The poem "Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" by Creator/WilliamButlerYeats, especially considering that Aedh is a Yeats character described as pale, lovelorn, and lonely.
--->Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths,
--->Enwrought with golden and silver light,
--->The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
--->Of night and light and the half light,
--->I would spread the cloths under your feet:
--->But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
--->I have spread my dreams under your feet;
--->Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

* ''Literature/TheLorax'' by Creator/DrSeuss. Especially the ending:
-->UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
-->nothing is going to get better. It's not. SO...
-->Catch! calls the Once-ler. He lets something fall.
-->It's a Truffula Seed. It's the last one of all!
-->You're in charge of the last of the Truffula Seeds.
-->And Truffula Trees are what everyone needs.
-->Plant a new Truffula. Treat it with care.
-->Give it clean water. And feed it fresh air.
-->Grow a forest. Protect it from axes that hack.
-->Then the Lorax and all of his friends may come back.

* ''Literature/TheSoundAndTheFury'' has this for [[TheWoobie Benjy Compson.]] Benjy is a 33-year-old manchild with a profound mental retardation and no concept of time. The only person that ever loved Benjy was his sister, Caddy, and he never saw her after she was disowned for her promiscuity. When he was a teenager, Benjy was castrated for inadvertently attacking a young girl and is incapable of speaking. Perhaps the worst is at the very end when Benjy starts crying about Caddy: "But he bellowed slowly, abjectly, without tears; the grave hopeless sound of all voiceless misery under the sun."
** Quentin's section is heartbreaking. Quentin was raised on old South values; perhaps mostly importantly to him is that a woman should be pure. When Quentin's sister, Caddy, loses her virginity in premarital sex, it destroys the foundation of his whole world. Quentin does everything he can to share in Caddy's guilt and atone for it: he suggests suicide and lies to his father about who slept with Caddy. His father tells him that everything he believed in is worthless. Being the anachronism that Quentin is, he drowns himself. There's a plaque at the Charles River in Cambridge, MA to honor him.

* ''Literature/InfiniteJest''. The cockroach scene portrays Orin's desperation and passivity so well and so disturbingly and so strangely that it's impossible not to laugh and impossible not to be absolutely devastated. And Hal's slow descent, his horrific fate, and especially the scene when he looks out the window in the middle of the snow storm and can barely recognize himself are imaginably sad.

* The ending of ''Literature/CharlottesWeb''.

* ''LightNovel/FateZero'' has a tear jerker almost at a character's introduction. Kariya Matou tries to get the daughter of the woman he loves away from his terrible relative by going through hell from worms that eat his body but give him the magic he needs to become a master, and if you know of Fate/stay Night. You know he is going to fail. Not only that, but the consequences of his failure for the girl are dire. In fact, ''every'' scene involving either Sakura or Ilya is a Tearjerker, because you know it's going to end badly for them.

->''It is such a secret place, the land of tears.''

* Creator/JamesHerriot's books have their share of sad endings, but few can compare to the story of Debbie (adapted in {{Bowdlerized}} form into a book named ''The Christmas Day Kitten''). A stray cat who sometimes visits a wealthy woman for a bit of food and warmth shows up on Christmas with a kitten in her mouth. Then she falls over. The silver lining is, the woman takes the kitten in, calling him the best Christmas present she ever had.

I guess you could say I've a call.\\