Each book in the novel ends with a dramatic event partly as the result of the necessity Hardy felt to satisfy the demands of serial publication. The reader must be kept interested from month to month, and this was one way to do so.
The scene of Mrs. Yeobright's death, the dramatic incident with which this book ends, is full of irony: she is surrounded by those people who have unwittingly made possible the conditions for her being bitten by the adder. Clym has delayed in carrying out his desire to reconcile with his mother as soon as possible; Eustacia does not open the door to her, thinking that Clym will surely wake up and do so; Wildeve appears at Clym's house at the wrong moment and causes Eustacia to hesitate over whether or not to admit Mrs. Yeobright. All of them have reasons for what they do; yet, the woman lies dead.
This as well as the now falling curve by which the structure of the novel is described (falling because, for instance, Clym's eyesight fails, Clym and Eustacia begin to feel alienated from each other, and Mrs. Yeobright dies) once more embodies the theme of the novel. This theme — to repeat, man living in an indifferent, if not hostile, universe — is also shown directly in other places in these chapters: in Eustacia's refusing to accept blame for not letting Mrs. Yeobright in but instead placing it upon "the shoulders of some indistinct, colossal Prince of the World, who [has] framed her situation and [rules] her lot"; in Wildeve's unexpected inheritance, a large sum of money to a man whose worth is at least questioned by almost all the characters in the story.
