Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

Exercise 3 page 334

Hardy follows the Victorian convention of placing an orphan at the centre of the story but denies him the possibility to fulfill 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, he is never ‘seen’ by them. In his first experience of Christminster, 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 department from Victorianism, with its portrayal of weakened vitality and grey despair, in a bleak urban setting deprived of dynamism and characterized by a sense of anxiety and self-destruction. By focusing on the relationship between Jude and Sue, Hardy develops the story through the characters’ repetition of dialogues, denying the narrator the possibility to explain and interpret things. In this way, he anticipates the aesthetic and tragic quality of the modern novel by means of a two-voiced process of analysis of the human psyche.

Analysis of an extract taken from Chapter II

Kind of narrator : omniscient third person narrator

Narrative technique (showing – telling) : the narrator privileges the narrative technique of telling, though he exploits also the technique of showing, for example reporting the words written on the paper DONE BECAUSE WE ARE TOO MANY

Characterization: characters are presented indirectly through their actions, their behaviors and their words, allowing the writer’s judgment to come to the surface through adjectives and adverbs

Setting: the is set into an internal closed space, the room where Sue and the three children used to live