The characters in Silas Marner were George Eliot’s perception to represent the working class and wanted to show what many of them do and what they have to live with. She portrayed them in Silas Marner. She has given each character a different personality representing their different working class. People get what they deserve in this novel due to their own doing. Silas is a main character in George Eliot’s novel. Silas is punished early on but he is happy because he has committed any wrong doing so he gets what he deserves although it can be argued. Silas changes greatly during the course of the novel, but a part of him always remains. He is a linen-weaver who was a young man and was falsely accused of theft and was blamed by the church community of Lantern Yard. The betrayal by a William Dane costs Silas his faith in men, and the betrayal of the in his faith and in God. He leaves in disgrace of his best friend and Lantern Yard. He settles on the border of the village of Raveloe, his faith in God and humanity shattered by his experience in Lantern Yard. He is changing person due to the outcomes in the past. He quietly works his job. He is an unusual and lonely stranger in Raveloe as they rarely have outsiders. Marner is the typical collector as he collects the gold he earns at his loom. As the novel goes on, eventually his gold is stolen from him. The gold was the only thing in his life and he felt like if it was his baby and he cared a lot about the gold. In the novel he thinks to himself “What thief would find his way to the Stone-pits on such a night as this? and why would he come on this particular night, when he had never come through all the twelve years before?” This shows he is in a lot of confusion and why it has happened to him. He has believed that he has done nothing wrong in his life and also why has he got punished. He thinks that he has not hurt anyone in the village so why should anyone steal his money. ‘Maybe the only thing he has done wrong is not having belief in God.’ This idea maybe a possible reason why his money was stolen and it was fate and destiny that has done this to him. By not believing in God it has backfired on him and therefore God has ‘punished’ him for not believing in God. He has his most treasured and love item stolen and this could be because of God and not believing in him. Silas’s has accepted what has come at him and has lived on. He has faced some terrible ordeals but he is rewarded with a child. He has been through a lot and when things started looking bad they started to lighten up him. He gets his stolen money back, he has got a wonderful child, he is happy and faith is restored into him, in the end everything is going right for him. He is not a selfish man and he has not committed a terrible crime so destiny has played its part in his life. He has reacted to the situations that he has to face quite calmly.
Eliot takes care to give each character his or her just deserts. Dunsey dies, the Squire's lands are divided Godfrey wins Nancy but ends up childless, and Silas lives happily ever after with Eppie as the most admired man in Raveloe. The tidiness of the novel's resolution may or may not be entirely believable, but it is a central part of Eliot's goal to present the universe as morally ordered. Fate, in the sense of a higher power rewarding and punishing each character's actions, is a central theme of the novel. For Eliot, who we are determines not only what we do, but also what is done to us. Nearly any character in the novel could serve as an example of this moral order, but perhaps the best illustration is Godfrey. Godfrey usually means well, but is unwilling to make sacrifices for what he knows to be right. At one point Godfrey finds himself actually hoping that Molly will die, as his constant hemming and hawing have backed him into so tight a corner that his thoughts have become truly horrible and cruel. However, throughout the novel Eliot maintains that Godfrey is not a bad person, he has simply been compromised by his inaction. Fittingly, Godfrey ends up with a similarly compromised destiny: in his marriage to Nancy he gets what he wants, only to eventually reach the conclusion that it is not what he wanted after all as she is childless. Godfrey ends up in this ironic situation not simply because he does deserve, but because compromised thoughts and actions cannot, in the moral universe of Eliot's novel, have anything but compromised results.
Godfrey Cass is another main character in the novel and he deserves what he gets because of his actions. Fate and destiny has changed his life because of his actions and it all turns out to the worse. Godfrey's character is summed up by Eliot near the beginning of the novel as "irresolution and moral cowardice," a state in which he continues until almost the end. He does not have the courage to take responsibility for his acts nor to give up his desires when they conflict with duty. His own desires still are the most important thing to him. He puts them in the form of principle now and he thinks he has a "right" to his daughter, which he neglected many years ago. The unexpected resistance he meets from Silas and Eppie brings home to him for the first time the fact that rights and duties cannot be separated. He accepts his take to task willingly. Still, he fails to do his whole duty. He takes the forceful and easy way out, deciding to "own" Eppie only in his will. He fails because Eppie want to stay with Silas, who has raised her up. It is irony for Godfrey because he cannot have a child from Nancy, because she cannot have children, and he wants his only child Eppie who he rejected early on but now she has rejected staying with Godfrey. “Godfrey was silent. He was not likely to be very penetrating in his judgments, but he had always had a sense that his father's indulgence had not been kindness, and had had a vague longing for some discipline that would have checked his own errant weakness and helped his better will.” Here Godfrey is resisting a severe warning from his father, Squire Cass, after confessing that he lent Dunsey rent money from one of his father's tenants. The Squire complains that he has been “too good a father” and has spoiled his sons. In this regard, the Cass household provides a counterpoint to the domestic life Silas and Eppie later create. Both Godfrey and Eppie grow up motherless. Both fathers indulge their children, but while the Squire does so out of negligence, Silas does so out of love. Eppie never doubts Silas's love for her, whereas Godfrey, in this passage, has precisely that doubt about his father. Eliot implies that this crucial difference is the reason Godfrey has grown up weak and cowardly, while Eppie possesses a strong sense of values. This contrast is all the more striking since Eppie is in fact Godfrey's natural daughter. Fate and destiny has had its toll on Godfrey because all his wrong doings has affected him in every way. Godfrey actions had its consequences and now his alone with his wife, childless and no one to be heir to his wealth. Overall Godfrey Cass got what he deserved.
Many people got what they deserve due to their actions. Silas and Godfrey are examples how the way that you act can have an effect on the future. By taking situations in a certain manner can have an effect on the future. Any decision that you make will predict the future of your life. For instance Dustan Cass was the bad seed of the Cass family; Dunstan is a hard-drinking, money-blowing, irresponsible young man. He borrows money from Godfrey early in the novel, and in order to pay it back, steals Godfrey's favourite horse, Wildfire, and sells him. Before making the trade, Dunstan gets Wildfire killed in a hunting accident. On his way home from the accident Dunstan passes by Silas's house, finds his gold, and steals it. He is then not heard of. A long time later he is found and it turns out that he fell into the stone-pits near Silas's house and died there, but no one is quite sure if he committed suicide. Dunstan Cass’s has died due to what he does. He drinks, gambles, steals and lies. He gets his ‘just desserts,’ for what he does. For doing terrible things it is most like terrible are likely to happen to you back, and George Eliot shows this with Dustan dying. Eppie may have got the best of her mother dying because if she was raised by a drug addict it is most likely that she will turn out the same but her mother died and Silas got her outside his house and now she is energetic, vibrant girl with flowing golden curls. She has a peaceful and happy life being raised up with Marner. Now she is married and enjoying herself. Actions of people may benefit other but may ruin their own lives. For example Godfrey and Eppie, Godfrey left Eppie’s mother to die and that may have been a benefited Eppie but Godfrey has had it not had it as good because by not helping out his sick, first wife he would of got Eppie if he did. The novel has a lot of irony and show that actions have consequences.
Silas Marner, written by George Eliot in 1861, attempts to prove that love of others is ultimately more fulfilling than love of money. This theme shows throughout the novel. Though Silas finds some satisfaction in his tenacious weaving and hoarding of gold, he only discovers true happiness after he dedicates himself to inter-personal relationships. Though his exile from Lantern Yard proves devastating to his self confidence and trust in others and God, fifteen years later Silas makes a full recovery. Eliot portrays Godfrey and Dunstan as wealthy, selfish people who try to use one another and others to their personal advantage and that the upper class has damaged society. The Cass family, shown as the upper class, thinks that their wealth gives them special rights to anything. This shows that you can be happy but poor and sad but rich. My personal opinion is that any action you take will affect your life and by doing something bad will make situations in life bad. Silas Marner is an example how fate and destiny works if you do something bad. By being kind, humble is more likely that you will turn out happy and you will get lucky because of destiny. You should treat people equally and look after each other because the very thing you want might be what the other person has or is. George Eliot has written the novel in a psychological manner because if you really think about it the story has a moral and that destiny is determined on what you do. George Eliot implies that being good in life will make you have good outcomes. Overall fate and destiny decide the future of what you do, by the actions you are doing right now in the present.