Determinism in Naturalism
People don't have much control over their fate in Naturalist fiction. Things happen to them, and no matter how hard they try to fight their circumstances, or overcome obstacles, they're often just… doomed.
In this regard, Naturalist fiction tends to be quite deterministic. Naturalist writers believed that we are shaped by our environments, and by our inherent nature. We can't escape them. We can run, but we can't hide. And because we can't escape our social and biological conditioning, we have much less control over our destiny than we may like to think. Dang.
Chew On This
In Richard Wright's Native Son, the title character, Bigger, reflects on the fact that he doesn't really have any free will. Check out these quotations from the book here.
At the end of Émile Zola's Thérèse Raquin, two lovers commit suicide. Zola presents this tragic end to the lovers' lives as inevitable. Have a look at an analysis of this deterministic ending here.