Jude the Obscure

Jude the Obscure By Thomas Hardy

Jude the Obscure is a novel by Thomas Hardy, which begun as a  magazine serial in  December  1894 and was first published in book  form in 1895. It is Hardy last completed novel. The protagonist, Jude Fawley, is a working class young man;  he is a stonemason who dreams of becoming a scholar. The other main character is his cousin, Sue  Bridehead, who is also his central love interest. The novel is concerned in particular with issues of class, education, religion, morality and marriage.

Character  of  Novel 

Jude Fawley

The novel's protagonist, a poor orphan who is raised by his great - aunt after his parents divorced and died. Jude dreams of attending the university at Christminister,  but he fails to be accepted because of his working class background. He is a skilled stonemason and a kindly soul who cannot hurt any living thing. Jude's "fatal flaw" is his weakness regarding alcohol and women, and he allows his marriage to Arabella, even though it is unhappy, to distract himself from his dream. He shares a deep connection with his cousin Sue, but their relationship is doomed by  their earlier marriages, society's disapproval, and  bad  luck.  Jude starts out pious and religious, but by the end of his life he has grown agnostic and bitter.

Jude is Obscure in that he comes from uncertain origins, struggles largely unnoticed to realize his aspirations, and dies without having made any mark on  the world. He is also obscure in the sense of being ambiguous: he is divided internally, and the conflicts range all the way from that between sexual desire and knowledge to  that between two different views of the world. Jude is therefore, struggling both with  the world and with himself. 

He is not well equipped to win. though he is intelligent enough and determined, he tries to force his way to the knowledge he wants. though well -intentioned and goodhearted, he  often acts impulsively on the basis of too little objective evidence. Though he  is unable to hurt an animal or another human being, he shows very little concern for himself and his own survival, often needlessly sacrificing his own good. He never learns, as phillotson  finally does perhaps too late, to calculate how to  get what he wants. In short,  he is more human than divine, as Hardy points out.

He is obsessed with ideals. Very early he makes Christminster into an ideal of  the intellectual  life, and his admitted failure there does not dim the luster with which it shine in his imagination to the very end of his life. He searches for the ideal woman who will be both lover and companion, and though he finds passion without intellectual interests in Arabella and wide interests  but frigidity in Sue he maintains the latter as his ideal to his deathbed. Recognizing the christminster holiday just before he died, Jude says, 

               "And I here. And Sue defiled!"

Jude is reconciled to his fate before he dies only in the sense that he recognizes what it is. In a conversation with Mrs. Edlin hesays that perhaps he and Sue were  ahead of their time in the way they wanted to live. He does not regret the struggle he has made,at the least, as he lies ill he tries to puzzle out the meaning of the life. At the very end, however , like job he wonders why he was born. But then so perhaps dose every man, Hardy seems to imply.