Notes about the Extract Done Because We Are too Menny (4/6/12)

In the fifth paragraph of the extract Sue and Jude are talking about children's death. Sue expresses her sense of guilt but Jude denies it, refusing it is her fault. Jude gives an opinion about human nature and to justify his idea he supports it referring to what the doctor said.
Mr Hardy uses a character who totally adopts a scientific perspective. There is C. Darwin's theories influence to explain little Jude's nature. Jude says the doctor said that there is a desire to refuse life. Jude says of the doctor he is an advanced man.
The narrator limits his presence to quote what characters say: the narrator accepts a new vision of life. The narrator wants to make the reader understand that in Victorian society if the person does not adapt, he can not survive. The reader can make sense of what has happened either accepting the doctor's perspective. The narrator shows Jude's argumentation in his own words, where he reports the doctor's point of view which he considers an advanced man. Showing the character in his words leaves the reader free to judge and to accept or not what he said.
In the last sequence there is a fatalist vision of society.

Notes about Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy's production belongs to the last decades of the 19th century. When he wrote Wessex novels he was very famous. Even if he was successful, his narration was criticized.
The novel Jude the Obscure is interesting because the main character is, for the first time, a member of the working class. His crime is his desire for education. Education provides a lens that allows to better seeing the world (Oscar Wilde's Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray).
With T. Hardy's novels the quest for something begins: it will be an important theme in Modernist literature.
He uses a tragic atmosphere (there is an unobtrusive narrator).
Everything is told in its peculiar details and the parts presented seem more a scene.
Mr Hardy's adopts in his novels the idea that nature is indifferent to man's condition.
The world he was used to know is loosing ground.
His pessimistic attitude is due to the study of A. Schopenauer's works.

Nature in T. Hardy's Production

Nature plays an important role in T. Hardy's literary production. It is seen as vindictive and harmful for those people who do not relate to against it. It therefore becomes symbolic of the moods and situations of the characters of what they experience and live. His stories are an effort to give shape and coherence to a series of situations or personal impressions. T. Hardy himself says that what he wrote were impressions.