This paper deals with a well known open problem raised by Kannan (Bull. Calcutta Math. Soc., 60: 71–76, 1968) and B. E. Rhoades (Contemp. Math., 72: 233–245, 1988) on the existence of general contractions which have fixed points, but do not force the continuity at the fixed point. We propose some new affirmative solutions to this question using two new contractions called $(\psi ,\phi )$- $\mathcal{A}$-contraction and $(\psi ,\phi )$- ${\mathcal{A}}^{\mathrm{\prime }}$-contraction inspired by the results of H. Garai et al. (Applicable Analysis and Discrete Mathematics, 14(1): 33–54, 2020) and P. D. Proinov (J. Fixed Point Theory Appl. (2020) 22: 21). Some new fixed point and common fixed point results in compact metric spaces and also in complete metric spaces are proved in which the corresponding contractive mappings are not necessarily continuous at their fixed points. Moreover, we show that new solutions to characterize the completeness of metric spaces. Several examples are provided to verify the validity of our main results.