Pain is a predominant theme throughout Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge. Hardy describes how many of the character's experience pain through relationships and how each of them deal with their suffering. Both Michael Henchard and Elizabeth-Jane Newson experience difficulty with their relationships, which causes them to suffer from painful events in their lives. They are alike in that they both suffer from the "problem of pain" but they differ in the way they choose …
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…control but she doesn't let that bother her. In Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, Elizabeth-Jane and Henchard both suffer from unfortunate results that bring about pain to each of them. They each have different ways of coping with this pain. Elizabeth-Jane puts the events in the past and moves on with her life while Henchard sulks in the misery brought on not by fate, as he believes, but by his own mistakes and foolish choices.