fatalism
fay tuh li zuhm
- n a submissive mental attitude resulting from acceptance of the doctrine that everything that happens is predetermined and inevitable
- n a philosophical doctrine holding that all events are predetermined in advance for all time and human beings are powerless to change them
- He has so little furtive pleasure to gain, and so much reputation to put at risk, that his dalliance has the lurid fatalism of a soap opera.
- He condensed, combined and reshuffled the stanzas, dropping what did not suit him and pumping in generous transfusions of his own sentimental, post-Darwin fatalism.
- His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, had enough of the juice of life to disguise this sophomoric fatalism.