Page 334, exercise 3.

Jude's obscurity

Hardy follows the Victorian convention of placing an orphan at the centre of the story but denies him the POSSIBILITY to fulfil his hopes. Instead, he takes him from defeat to defeat to the DENIAL of any form of life, love and peace. Despite the social criticism it involves, the tragedy of Jude is MAINLY of FRUSTRATION and LONELINESS due to his uprooting. Jude is 'obscure' because he does not 'exist' for others, is never 'seen' by them. In his first experience of Christminister, he becomes a 'self-spectre', and this experience is repeated throughout his career so that he can declare at the end: 'I am neither a DWELLER among men nor ghosts'. Jude's attempt to improve himself fails in the face of centuries of accumulated class prejudice: his ambitions and SENSIBILITY separate him from his own class while winning him no place in any other. Jude the Obscure represents a DEPARTURE from Victorianism, with its portrayal of weakened vitality and grey despair, in a bleak urban SETTING depreived of dynamism and characterised by a sense of anxiety and self-destruction. By focusing on the relationship between Jude and Sue, Hardy develops the story through the characters' REPEATED dialogues, denying the narrator the possibility to explain and interpret things. In this way, he anticipates the aesthetics and tragic quality of the modern novel by means of a two-voiced process of analysis of the human psyche.

Page 337, exercise 2.

1. Jude is allarmed when he hears a shriek coming from children's room.

2. He runs to Sue's room and realises that nobody was there.

3. When he looks round the room he notices the two youngest children hanging from a nail.

4. Although he is terrified, he cuts the chords and put the three corpses on their bed.

5. Then he calls a doctor and a surgeon.

6. Jude and Sue reach the conclusion that two children were dead and Sue only survived.

7. They find a piece of paper with a sentence written on it.

8. The doctor thinks that the boy felt death as an inevitable need.

Exercise 3.

1. The boy's face reflects all the negative aspects of his life: accidents, mistakes, fear and death.

2. Jude and Sue hear a subdued voice coming from the wall behind them.

3. Jude was afraid that the voices were talking about what happened, afraid that someone saw something and harm them.

4. Jude's view differ from Sue's.

5. Sue feel guilty of what happened, because she made the boy angry. Jude does not agree because she thinks that Sue made it for a greater good but it did not worked.

Exercise 4.

The narrator focuses on the main object, followed by a close-up detail. It can be conveyed in the description od dead's boy's face: from the general view of the situation to the details of ''all the accidents, mistakes, fears, errors of the last'' of his life.

Exercise 5.

Hardy's children differ from Dickens's because Hardy put them in a difficult situation, outside the industrial setting: they are victims of supernatural forces that order them their will. These features can be explained by the interest of Hardy for philosophic texts.

Exercise 6.

Lines 54-59: Existence and condition of life.

Lines 64-65: Christianity and its useless attitude.

Lines 70-74: Arguing on useless religious matter.

Lines 84-85; 96-97: Anxieties about life and adaptations in Victorian society.