Jude The Obscure Themes

This Study Guide consists of approximately 28 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Jude The Obscure.

Jude The Obscure Themes

This Study Guide consists of approximately 28 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Jude The Obscure.
This section contains 624 words
(approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Jude The Obscure Short Guide

Jude The Obscure Summary & Study Guide Description

Jude The Obscure Summary & Study Guide includes comprehensive information and analysis to help you understand the book. This study guide contains the following sections:

This detailed literature summary also contains Key Questions on Jude The Obscure by Thomas Hardy.

Preview of Jude The Obscure Summary:

Although the key issues of Jude the Obscure involve the hopeless sense Hardy has of modern marriage as an institution desperately in need of reform and of the complicity of Church and state in perpetuating an institution Hardy sees as inimical to human happiness, what is remarkable about this novel in the Hardy canon is its lack of emphasis on determinism.

While its most horrid moment, the murder of the children and suicide by Father Time, the wretched son of Jude's and Arabella's marriage, carries the overtone of fatalism, in the main this novel is a narrative of choices. It can of course be argued that our choices are based on our innate dispositions, and that choice is therefore an illusion—that, for example, Jude had no choice except to become intimate with Arabella because of his biological needs and her exploitation of them—but the...

This section contains 624 words
(approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Jude The Obscure Short Guide
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Jude The Obscure from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.