Of Fate In Kazuo Ishiguro's Jane Eyre: Fate And Free Will

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Oftentimes, it is difficult for a reader to be able to distinguish whether or not an event occurs due to fate or the actions of the character. In Charlotte Brönte’s Jane Eyre, it appears that many of Jane’s decisions made out of her free will are to deal with situations that are outside of her control and due to fate, showing how someone can use free will to correct the situations that come up due to fate. While in Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, Kathy seems to be completely unable to make any decisions out of free will, completely subjected to outside forces and fate, revealing the idea that much of what happens in someone’s life is out of his or her control. However, both of the characters’ situations show the difficulty in distinguishing whether an event is due to fate or free will and how interpretation of the story often gives people different opinions on whether an event is the result of fate or free will. In Jane Eyre, Jane faces many different obstacles throughout her whole life that get in the way of her ability to achieve happiness, which get resolved by decisions made out of her own free will. This back and forth between fate and free will is seen right from …show more content…

Even though the two fall in love, which could be interpreted as either fate or free will, fate intervenes at their wedding when it is revealed that Rochester is still married to Bertha, his estranged wife (Brönte 377). This revelation causes Jane to leave Rochester out of her own free will even though she really loved him. Even though she refused to marry and left him, Jane never forgot Rochester during this time, “not [even] for a moment” because his name “was a name graven on a tablet, fated to last as long as the marble it inscribed”, and “the craving to know what had become of him followed [Jane] everywhere…” (Brönte

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