Explanation of These Authors and Novels Including Their Literature Era

¶ … control over one's own destiny is an illusion of misconstructed ideals and metaphysical analysis. Beginning with Sigmund Freud's fascination with the power of the unconscious which he explicitly details through his work Dora (1963), the influence that the unconscious has on an individual is explicated and determined to practically guide everything that one does, but without really giving the illusion that one is in control. The unconscious controls the self, but does it define who one is? When there is no sense of control or free will, things fall apart. One wants to know that one can influence the way that one's life turns out, but in reality, a very small number of things are actually under one's control. By attributing all sense of control and destiny to the unconscious, one either loses the definition of who one is as a person, or gives up any sort of power in the demise of one's own life.

This loss of self can be seen in the turning of the 20th and 21st century when industrialization began to take over the world. People living during these times had little say over how this radical change would impact their lives. Just as colonization destroyed a way of being for some individuals who no matter how hard they tried could not control what was going around them, the same concept applies to industrialization and the implications that this brought upon all people. As a way of avoiding any change around oneself, one is forced into seclusion and isolation as a means of avoiding the ever-growing change around. This was the case in The Hours (1998) where in order to not get drowned in an existence that seemed to be out of control and out of one's own hands, living reclusively and acknowledging the lack of power over the self was something that each character had to go through, because without a center, all things fall apart.

This sense of complete hopelessness and the illusion that although one tries to control one's own life, could be met with disappointment as Kafka eludes in The Metamorphosis (1915). Being led into a realm of seclusion because of the need to control and exert one's free will can lead to the realization that at times free will, choice, nor control can exist in one's life. In Camus's The Guest (1957), Camus goes into the theme of choice, noting that the only choice one has is to not choose. Life is all about one final ending, death, and that is the only thing that one can ever be assured of. There is no such thing as knowing what the right thing to do is because whether one chooses, the ultimate consequence will always be death, something not in one's control nor part of a choice one can make. There is no such thing as choosing not to die because it is metaphysically impossible.