People attempting to deal with depression by getting drunk in Literature.
- Frank Browning does this in the first book of the Ahriman Trilogy when he thinks he's failed again.
- The Alice Network: Eve tends to drink to kill the pain. Charlie and Finn sometimes join her. (Finn in particular mentioned that he drank a lot after coming back from the war, and that this led to some of his worse decisions.)
- Ascendance of a Bookworm: After needing to break to her family the news that she only has a year left to live, Myne wakes up in the middle of the night and notices her father drinking alone in the kitchen.
- Beautiful Music for Ugly Children: After John's wife and kids left him in 1974, he spent the next five years getting drunk every day. He went cold turkey on the anniversary of their separation.
- David and Leigh Eddings have used this at various times in The Belgariad and its prequels.
- Belgarath tried this in Belgarath the Sorcerer, after learning of his wife Poledra's Death by Childbirth. Aldur (his Master, a Physical God) seems to have stepped in and stopped him by making him physically ill to the point where he couldn't touch the stuff. (Belgarath then spent some years with the ladies of Maragor; when Beldin finally retrieved him, he said that Belgarath's drunkenness was still legendary in Camaar.)
- Silk does this in The Belgariad after speaking with his mother for the first time in years. To elaborate, his mother used to be a beautiful woman but caught a blindness-inducing illness that left her face horribly scarred, and nobody could ever bring themselves to let her know. The scene is powerful precisely because of the contrast with Silk's playing a jerk and the overall humorous tone of the series.
- Belisarius Series: It's something of a tradition of Antonina's, when Belisarius goes away on a potentially hopeless mission against the Malwa, to get thoroughly trashed, accompanied by Irene.
- Hazel in Big Blonde takes to alcohol in order to deal with her sadness and her bad marriage. She quickly becomes an alcoholic.
- The Bone Wars: After the death of Jim Dundee, two of his grief-stricken longtime cowhands head to the nearest saloon, and 48 hours later, one of them still hasn't sobered up or set foot outside.
- A Boy Made of Blocks: When Alex tells Dan that he's been laid off, Dan says, "Put the controller down. We are going out and we are getting shit-faced."
- The Butcher Boy: Benny, Francie Brady's father, is a bitter and abusive alcoholic.
- In Tom Kratman's Caliphate, on the first days of his espionage mission when he was visiting South Africa, Hamilton wishes that he could get totally trashed over his cover job of a child slave trader, but can't afford the resultant loss of control in what's effectively "enemy territory".
- Several characters in Carrera's Legions, including the main protagonist, sink to this, usually over having their hearts broken.
- The Miskatonic Affair: A very depressed Cassandra does this with a bottle of red wine over the thinking of how the world will come to an end if the villains succeed in their plans to bring about the apocalypse with the Necronomicon.
- The Cat Who... Series: Qwill, prior to the start of the series, although he has sworn off alcohol by the time the first book begins.
- In the Chrestomanci series Christopher considers getting drunk after not being able to reach Millie. He's 15 at the time.
- "One could get awfully drunk here," Christopher remarked, surveying a dusty wall of bottles marked Nuits d’été 1848. "I have quite a mind to drown my sorrows, Grant. I saw Millie. I talked to her. Do you know how to open champagne?"
- In Dorothy Gilman's The Clairvoyant Countess, Mr. Faber-Jones, after his wife leaves him.
- Genghis Khan in Conn Iggulden's Bones of the Hills takes to the airag after Temulun is killed during a raid (after being raped by Kokchu).
- In The Dragon's Path, the first book in The Dagger and the Coin, this is Cithrin's response to losing out on a key deal for her bank. She makes an earnest attempt to drink herself into oblivion.
- The Hard Heart cantina on the Death Star becomes this to a greater and greater extent as the plot progresses. Sometime after the destruction of Alderaan, the proprietor asks the bouncer to remove the few patrons who were having too much fun, and the remainder are quiet, shell-shocked.It felt like a memorial service, and, in its own way, it was.
- Discworld:
- Sam Vimes was perpetually drunk up until his marriage to Sybil Ramkin. It's implied that his Knight in Sour Armor cynicism, combined with a job Vetinari had purposely made irrelevant and pointless, is what drove him to drink.
- In Feet of Clay, Nobby Nobbs is told he's heir to the title of the Earl of Ankh, and Nobby's fear of responsibility briefly drives him to drink.
- In Soul Music, one of the methods Death tries to forget his troubles is drinking, but all it does is make him even more depressed. He does manage to make an awesome drunken speech (and drunken collapse) though.
- The Luggage, an animated chest whose sentience is debatable, once got itself drunk on orakh (liquor made from cactus sap and scorpion venom, used to mitigate the effects of Klatchian Coffee) after being rejected by Conina.
- Detritus, Gaspode and Thomas Silverfish all do this about halfway through Moving Pictures; Detritus is drinking because his girlfriend Ruby wants to be courted as the humans do and he keeps getting it wrong, Gaspode is drinking because Victor is ignoring his warnings about Ginger being in the thrall of Eldritch Abominations, and Silverfish is drinking because he hates the way C.M.O.T. Dibbler is running his movie studio, relying on spectacle instead of True Art.
- Dragonriders of Pern series:
- Lytol drinks to unconsciousness whenever he is forcibly reminded of his dragon's death, as a way of easing the pain of the loss. This is considered better than the alternative; most riders who lose their dragons kill themselves.
- There's a small instance in the first book of the same series. F'lar assumed leadership of the weyr from previous Weyrleader R'gul. After Weyrwoman Lessa performs the huge event of the plot, R'gul insists that it's not possible and F'lar must be mad and privately prepares to resume leadership once F'lar's incapability is publicly known. When people show up who prove that it really did happen exactly the way the leaders said, "R'gul got very quietly drunk."
- Dr. Skinner in Dr. Franklin's Island has a conscience, however much he claims he's smothered it, which flares up in a big way when his boss gets his hands on the teen survivors of a plane crash and wants to do some LEGO Genetics on them to slowly turn them into animals. One night, before their operation, he tries to set the girls free and give them a chance to reach the mainland. They smell alcohol on his breath. He was either trying to drown his conscience or taking Liquid Courage.
- Evidence of Things Not Seen: When Tara's mom learns that her husband was a drug dealer murdered by a 17-year-old prostitute he was having an affair with, she goes straight to her room with a bottle of wine and drinks until she passes out.
- In Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts novel Honor Guard, after a disaster, Gaunt takes to drowning his sorrows — and not eating properly.
- In Good Omens, the demon Crowley once received a commendation from his superiors in Hell for starting the Spanish Inquisition. He didn't actually start it, he just happened to be in the area when it happened. When he finally started looking around to see what this Inquisition was all about, he ended up spending most of his time afterward drinking himself stupid.
- Two examples in Green Angel: The first is the titular Green, who drinks to numb her grief after the nearby city is blown up and her family is among the casualties. Later on, there's the Forgetting Shack, where numerous people drink themselves blind and dance to exhaustion due to suffering similar losses.
- GONE: Orc drinks to forget about his actions and the fact that he has become a literal monster as well as to kill himself.
- Harry Potter:
- Hagrid in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (implied). Sybil Trelawney as well, in the same book, more blatantly — how many times does one need to read "the strong smell of cooking sherry" before getting the hint?
- In Goblet of Fire, Winky the house-elf drinks several bottles of Butterbeer a day after being fired by Mr. Crouch. Butterbeer is a very mild drink for humans (children can drink it without any problem) but it's pretty strong for house-elves.
- Haymitch Abernathy of The Hunger Games has been doing this ever since he left the titular Deadly Game as a teenager. Considering his only ally and friend in the arena was killed without him having even the slightest chance to save her and most of his family and friends were then killed to punish him for his almost nonexistent "rebellion", and his job ever since has been to accompany and train two kids a year for an almost certain death in the titular Deadly Game, you can see why.
- Just Juliet: Juliet tried to do this with alcohol and drugs after losing her mother as a young teen.
- In the Knight and Rogue Series Fisk claims that he handled being dumped by his first crush "in the time-honored way" while telling the audience about a time Jack had come to scold him for being too sentimental and attached to people while he was drunk.
- H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy has a sad-whimsical description of the process:"Take a drink because you pity yourself, and then the drink pities you and has a drink, and then two good drinks get together and that calls for drinks all around."
- When The Little Prince visits a planet with no-one but a tippler on it, he inquires why the man is drinking constantly:Tippler: So that I may forget.
Prince: Forget what?
Tippler: Forget that I am ashamed.
Prince: Ashamed of what?
Tippler: Ashamed of drinking! - In The Man Who Carried Trouble Bill ends up in a bar, doing some hard drinking after a bad week.
- The Mermaid Chronicles: In Quest for Atlantis, Cordelia sees her boyfriend Wade kissing his ex Stephanie. Her friend Trent has been arguing with his girlfriend Maya over her desire to be turned into a mermaid and his refusal to turn her. The two of them drown their romantic woes in a bottle of Mexican tequila. Then they drunkenly kiss, which of course makes their problems worse.
- Vanessa from My Dark Vanessa relies on alcohol, cigarettes, and sometimes Ativan to get through the day.
- Happens in the Night Huntress series. Three days after Bones leaves her, Cat's apartment is littered with empty gin bottles and ice cream cartons.
- In A Night in the Lonesome October, the monk Rastov drinks heavily to dull his awareness of all the suffering in the world that he is unable to prevent. After his death, his familiar Quicklime goes on a several-days-long bender, using fermented windfall fruit as his source of alcohol.
- In Feed, after he's told that the outbreak on the family ranch resulting in the deaths of his daughter, his wife's parents, and about half their employees, was intentionally caused by someone injecting a horse with live Kellis-Amberlee and causing it to amplify into a chompy zombie, Senator Ryman tells Shaun and Georgia he'll talk to them about the matter the next day, after he breaks the news to his wife and then, as he puts it, "get very, very drunk".
- Out of the Dust: Billie Jo's mother had been saving up money for a while. After she becomes terribly burned and deformed due to an accident involving kerosene, her husband takes the money and goes out to drink. This leaves Billie especially bitter because she couldn't help her mother much in her condition. The burns on her hands prevented her from giving her mother water to drink, despite her mother's pleas. It takes a while for her to forgive her dad.
- In the Paladin of Shadows novel A Deeper Blue, Mike does this at the start, unable to get over Gretchen's death in Unto the Breach.
- In the first Red Dwarf novel, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, Lister's response to finding out that Everybody's Dead, Dave is a spectacular mental breakdown complete with massive alcohol abuse. It is not played for laughs; in fact, it goes beyond this trope to look more like a narrowly averted attempt at suicide by alcohol.
- The Rise of Kyoshi: During his lifetime, Avatar Kuruk had a rather lousy reputation for doing nothing except for drinking and fooling around with women than actually doing his job as an Avatar. It is later revealed that Kuruk spent most of his time killing dark spirits who threatened the human world. Not only the battles severely injured him, Kuruk felt extremely regretful for having to kill spirits, even if they were evil. He never revealed the reason why the spirits tried to attack humans (they were slighted by unequal treaties that were brokered by Kuruk's predecessor, Yangchen, who favored humans over spirits and as a result had a stellar reputation in the human world) or even why he had to disappear from the human world for a long time. Therefore, the only thing he could do to numb the pain of keeping secrets, injury, and regret was drinking and fooling around with women.
- Leesil, one of the protagonists of The Saga of the Noble Dead, drinks heavily in the first arc to suppress his memories of the time he spent as an assassin.
- Scavenge the Stars: The guilt of helping create the fake gold coins which are spreading a plague called Ash Fever across the city-state of Moray has led to Boon to take up hard drinking in order to alleviate his guilt and sadness.
- Dayless the Conqueror in Shadow of the Conqueror. Despite his incredible power and success, he was profoundly unhappy as an emperor due to him separating himself from his passions and morality. Downing large quantities of fine wine was the first, but definitely not the last, tactic he used to stave off his sorrow.
- In Sheep's Clothing, Wolf Cowrie polished off most of a bottle of brandy after he is forced to kill his vampirized ladylove.
- Shtum: As soon as Ben and Jonah arrive at Georg's house, Georg takes Jonah for an hours-long walk. Ben takes the opportunity to get smashed and fall asleep in front of the TV to cope with the prospect of not seeing Emma for the next few weeks.
- A Song of Ice and Fire:
- In the backstory, the young Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish does this after being (rather cruelly) rejected by his crush, Catelyn Tully. Unfortunately for him, Cat's sister, Lysa is infatuated with him and seems to like her men unconscious...
- King Robert Baratheon has spent years drinking, hunting, and whoring while being married to Cersei Lannister. He still can't get over the death of his beloved Lyanna Stark, her death left a hole in him which the seven realms couldn't even fill.
- Tyrion Lannister drinks to cope with the way his dwarfism subjected him to a dishonored life. He falls even further to this state upon learning that his father and brother had lied about the circumstances of his marriage to Tysha.
- Historically, Aegon II Targaryen, who turned to booze after his eldest son and heir, Jaehaerys, was beheaded by an assassin. That, and the fact that the injuries he sustained during the Dance of the Dragons left him in constant need of the milk of the poppy.
- In Spin, Carol Lawton spends most of the book perpetually wasted. Though one might assume that she drank primarily because of her loveless marriage to the overbearing E.D. Lawton, the real cause of her constant boozing is later revealed to be her misery over the knowledge that her one true love, Tyler's mother, was utterly straight and devoted to her husband.
- In Michael Flynn's Spiral Arm novel The January Dancer, a common reason to be in the Bar on Jehovah.
- Averted and played straight in Starfighters of Adumar — Wedge heads to a bar mostly for privacy while he thinks through some questions of honor vs. the chain of command (he doesn't get very drunk, either). However, at the bar, he runs across Admiral Rogriss, who decided the answer to his problem was to get stone drunk.
- Played straight in an earlier book of the series, when Ton Phanan, the Combat Medic of the squadron who is allergic to bacta and thus gradually becoming more and more cybernetic, drinks and tells his wingmate that he needs less and less to get drunk, because every year, less meat, more machine. He feels that his extensive cybernetics are an outward sign that his future has been destroyed, and he has no one.
- A Tale of Two Cities: Sydney Carton does this 24/7.
- The Three Musketeers: Athos is prone to this. It's depicted as habitual and inexplicable until he tells his I Have This Friend story.
- In Time Scout, Margo eventually realizes her father, though he's a bastard, may have developed his drinking problem as a result of her dead brother.
- The Tuning Station: When Ted's dad cut him off, he kept expecting Ted to come crawling back after a few weeks, but he never did. After that, his dad started drinking because he felt that the destruction of all his relationships was God's punishment for how badly he treated others.
- Underground: After the semi-finals fight, Robyn is unable to cope with Tyler's death and has Ana take her to a bar where she gets absolutely wasted.
- The Vampire Chronicles has a fair amount of this going on. Louis in Interview with the Vampire not only drinks away his sorrows but picks fights and sleeps with prostitutes, hoping to get himself killed. Later in Blackwood Farm Quinn also drinks away his sorrows and his fears. In Queen of the Damned, this is slightly subverted, as Daniel Molloy tries to drink away his madness (from the knowledge that vampires are real).
- Graham McNeill's Warhammer 40,000 Ultramarines novel The Killing Grounds opens with a former soldier trying to drown his sorrows. He ends up blowing his brains out as more effective.
