On Suicide as a transformative act, and on Suicide as a cowardly act:

Literature rarely represents suicide as an act of despair or defeat. While a character may feel despair and defeat before committing suicide, the narrative will often portray the act as one of meaninglessness or wastefulness, rather than a legitimate act. That said, death and especially suicide are always transformative events. Suicide in literature and art can be taken as symbol for self actualization, wherein self recognition and strength of will allow one to take a “great leap of faith,” as it were, achieving an unknown, ambiguous result.

Examples of creative media in which suicide is transformative: 

Donnie Darko, Persona 3, Fight Club, Cat’s Cradle

Sucide in creative media is a symbol of hope for a change of self or surroundings; an acknowledgement that the end of a life full of 'wrongness' is potentially the start of a new life. However, such themes belong in the realm of fiction. The symbol, metaphor, or allegory is simply demonstrative of a theme or moral. No real life is so wrong or backward that the transformative death used symbolically in literature and art is required. It is simply an extreme metaphor which encourages the death of a way of being that is not life, but living badly.

Hopelessness is a disease with one cure, and that is its opposite: hope. The transformative suicide is in effect the opposite of the cowardly suicide of this real life. It is not an escape from responsibility and hardship, but an embrace of the responsibility to escape the pull of societal norms through the death of bad living, and to effect changes through attitudinal shifts and revaluation.

Albert Camus depicted suicide as a rejection of freedom. The freedom afforded by this life is far more valuable than the escape afforded by real-life suicide. As Sartre said, those who have free will are burdened with the responsibility of it - but the ability to choose what one is responsible for (the consequences of our decisions) ought to make that responsibility a given, and hardly such an inconvenience as to warrant suicide.

Particularly in the faithless life, suicide squanders the chance that life provides. That said, suicide exemplifies a variety of wimpiness that borders on laziness. Plato described it as an act of sloth and unmanly cowardice.

Furthermore, the responsibility of free will correlates with the use of suicide as a symbol for self actualization. The metaphor represents suicide as a freely willed act of shedding mundane, worldly values, and one’s attachment to them. It shows a way beyond mass-illogic and ideology to an individualistic view; a relation between the creation and ascription of values and the responsibility to take part in that process, using free will.

A will that is bent or determined by a group or even just one other’s will is not free, and the acquiescence to such a force is a lazy, cowardly rejection of one’s own responsibility for self-determination.