Character Makes the Man One of the questions Thomas Hardy poses in his masterwork novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge, is the relationship between character and chance in destiny. Destiny in this novel most closely relates to the idea of destiny put forth in Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” where chance defines the paths for a person to take, but it is the person’s character itself, which decides the path he or …showed first 75 words of 452 total…

…showed last 75 words of 452 total…most readers will pick up from this novel. In the end, every road on the path to Henchard’s downfall is bypassed by his own character. He was never an evil man, just a man who acted wrongly and rashly at times, a character of strengths and weakness, a person with whom the reader could relate and feel the intenseness of his grief. Like any classically tragic figure, Henchard was responsible for his own downfall.