meets Troy by chance, which is fate, but he seeks her out afterwards, which is character. Moreover, there was a good chance that they would meet anyway. He says,

"Ah, Miss Everdene!" said the sergeant, touching his diminutive cap. "Little did I think it was you I was speaking to the other night ... To be sure I am no stranger to the place—I am Sergeant Troy, as I told you, and I have assisted your uncle in these fields no end of times when I was a lad. I have been doing the same for you to-day."

Troy begins to court Bathsheba (character, not fate). Gabriel warns her about him, but she does not listen (character again). Impetuously, she marries him, which is one of the most important developments in the narrative. The marriage is unhappy almost from the start—again character—but there is nothing Bathsheba believes she can do to extricate herself. After he discovers that Fanny has died, Troy fakes his death (character).

Bathsheba unfeelingly sends a coquettish message to her neighbor Mr. Boldwood, and he begins to think of her romantically (character and character). She believes that she is now free to marry, but she does not love Boldwood. However, she feels guilt over having misled him and believes that it might be the right thing to do (character). Suddenly, Troy reappears. In a fit of seeming madness, Boldwood kills Troy (character) and is sent to prison. Gabriel prepares to leave Bathsheba’s farm, and she agrees to marry him (character and character).

Writing at the end of the Victorian era, Hardy was a realist, though a rather grim one. Far from the Maddening Crowd, despite the many misfortunes its characters experience (due either to nature or to poor judgment), is probably the most cheerful of Hardy's major novels. At the same time, themes of unrequited love, poverty, sexual and financial exploitation, and death run throughout the novel.

We ask whether Fate (or Imminent Will, as Hardy tended to talk about the forces of divine capriciousness over human affairs) or character leads to the plot's resolution or the characters' end. But the question implies a binary that may not be accurate with Hardy. Rather, it might be better to examine the role of these natural forces in revealing character. Hardy does not necessarily suggest that a character is entirely at the whim of natural forces (as a Naturalist might). Hardy is intensely realistic in his depiction of detail and his restraint on moralizing, but it would likely be a stretch to put Bathsheba's story in that school. In particular, characters rise above the challenges they encounter and are not entirely overwhelmed by tragedy, but they do reveal character through these sorrows. Gabriel and Bathsheba do overcome their apparent fate (or society's norms, which seem to be as much a version of Fate as the divine), and characters of weaker integrity and strength succumb to their character (e.g., Troy). Given different societal circumstances, weaker characters may have survived more successfully, but the restrictions placed on people by class and gender in a Hardy novel cannot really be defined as Fate. Bathsheba's willingness to push against societal norms is what enables her to eventually achieve what she wants.

Hardy's novels frequently show the influence of a malevolent, or  indifferent, fate, and this is the source of much of their tragic effect. In Far from the Madding Crowd, we see a number of chance events, many giving rise to suffering, but we also see human action that can ameliorate or even avert catastrophe.

The loss of Gabriel Oak's sheep is the result of a coming together of different circumstances: an inexperienced sheepdog, a weakened fence, and a chalk pit close by his land. It is a coincidence that epitomises a cruel fate. However, when Bathsheba sends the 'fateful' Valentine to Boldwood, she 'tempts fate' by her game with Liddy and the Bible. Chance here is given an opening through human folly. Fanny, meanwhile, fails to be a bride through mistakenly turning up at the wrong church. After her death, a remorseful Troy has his efforts to tend her grave destroyed by the cruel accident of a water spout disgorging storm rains on to the newly-planted bulbs.  

Gabriel's actions and his loyalty to Bathsheba present an opposing motif in which catastrophe brought on by fate can be averted. When she has sacked him from the farm, he returns to save her flock of bloated sheep from certain demise. Later, his swift action prevents the loss of the entire harvest in the storm, while her husband sleeps drunkenly in the barn.

So, Hardy does present malign destiny in the novel. But he also recognises the redeeming qualities of human labour.