![]() According to Earnest Baker, it embodies "a great and simple tragedy complicated with hackneyed and unnecessary corroboration". ![]() ![]() The novel is a tragedy of the most moving type. With Fate and Chance playing their sadistic game, the end of such a life can hardly be expected to be joyful. "in his own judgment to add events to the narrative somewhat freely", The Mayor of Casterbridge remains a magnificent book, a highly finished work of novelistic art.Īs its full title, The Life and Death of the Mayor of Casterbridge: A Story of a Man of Character, indicates, the novel is concerned with the depiction of the ups and downs, rise and fall, joys and sorrows, and triumph and defeat in the struggle some life of its central character, Michael Henchard, in which happiness appears as a rare oasis in the vast and dreary desert of sorrow and misfortune. Despite certain weaknesses that have crept into it because of its being initially published as a weekly serial, which caused Hardy, as he himself tells us. Walter Allen regards this novel as Hardy's "simplest and most successful tragic novel". Lionel Johnson admits that he knows "few histories more poignant than this none which more perfectly fulfil the great demands of Aristotle upon the composers of the dramatic plot and the conceivers of dramatic character". ![]()
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