Learning Paths » 5B Interacting
The insistence and the attention of specific details of characters or situations creates a dramatic effect as the one you can come across in reading a tragedy. Apparently are the expenses of plot development and some frequent part of the novel are arranged and organized as if the novel were mode of scene (similar to what happen in Modernist novel).
In addition Mr. Hardy's narrator seems to privileged details and particulars. We can understand the sometime grotesque use of language in order to reach and effect of disgust and tragedy where the human being appears alone, powerless and, therefore, tragic. Thomas Hardy's novel have been compared to Greek tragedies and together with Schopenhauer's idea of immanent will. Hardy's characters appear victims of some inscrutable force.
Jude the Obscure offers a perfect example of a character, a protagonist whose tragedy depends on his strongest flow: his inability to reach a balance between rationality and instinct.
Hardy's artistic vision can be associated to philosophy scepticism and Darwinism.
Hardy shows harmony of view with Spencer, Comte, Hume and defines his idea as "evolutionary meliorism". There is an affinity between his view and Schopenhauer concept of immanent will or blind will. Man's struggle end and the conflict between reason and instinct take place in a world dominated by omen unhappy coincidence accident.
Thomas Hardy as been compared to Greek tragedy. As in the Greek tragedy, Hardy's character become victim getting to tragedy by a flow of their nature.
"Man's character is his personal destiny or demon". Themes of guilt and sin, responsibility and remorse are typical of Hardy's. Jude is brought to his down fall by his scholarly ambition, by his humanitarian ideas, his omen who believes in values of spiritual emancipation but ends up discovering they are follow and false. His most intimate problem is the conflict between flesh and spirit.
His intellectual aspiration are crashed by his own sensuality, his passion for Arabella, the embodiment of instinctual desire and of his weakness. Jude leaves Arabella because he cannot bear the burden of his early mistake and beside he has to many passion in conflict with one and other. The novel anticipates XX century literature through the destiny of psychic life images, of introspection, of inner torments and the description of all high society.