Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge: The story of the timeless tragedy of man

As a writer of the late Victorian era, Thomas Hardy is the product of the crisis of faith in fin de siècle period. Having been influenced by Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species and Benjamin Jowett's Essays and Reviews, he came to lose his religious belief; he developed a new idea about existence and human will. Under the influence of the epoch-making work by Schopenhauer The World as Will and Idea, he combined the influence of Darwin and Jowett with that of Schopenhauer, and formed his gloomy view about the mundane world which, for Hardy, is under the control of cruel and metaphysical powers that always crush the characters who acquired consciousness and will-power. Throughout The Mayor of Casterbridge, Hardy applies his fatalistic and deterministic philosophy to the depiction of the protagonist in order to reveal that Henchard is a trapped individual in a morally indifferent world which is controlled by the chance forces that seek the destruction of the ones who violate the natural laws by way of acquiring consciousness. Hence, throughout the novel, Hardy shows the universality of human suffering and its timelessness: He indicates that catastrophe befalls only to the ones who, with their acquired consciousness, desire the "better" for themselves, and whose schemes are ultimately crushed on account of the conflict between what man desires, and what gods have in store for man. Keywords: will, consciousness, hap, chance, crass-casualty, timelessness,fatalism, determinism