Jude the Obscure
Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy
This book is the first one I read from Thomas Hardy after his Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and it is the most contradictory novel I have ever read. Thomas Hardy,
as most critics commented, as it seemed to be, never failed to dissatisfy his readers by giving his novels disillusioned endings. In Tess of the D’Urbervilles
, Tess never was really able to reunion with her beloved husband in peace. And in this novel, even after Jude and Sue both broke away from their unfortunate marriages with others, they never succeeded in entering into their own matrimony.
There was the twinge of bitterness and absurdity of life throughout the novel. Jude, the protagonist, was almost born with the passion for reading and knowledge
. His yearn for going to Christminster when he was young, and his reminiscence of it after he was ill and had to lie on his bed, delineated an ardent and wishful soul for something he had never, and never will, achieve in his life. Reading
his story was like reading a longing heart which was unfortunately beaten by
odds and end in dying in misery.
Compassion is not enough when you walked along with Jude in his winding life journey. Just as what Thomas Hardy called his works, Jude the Obscure is a novel of
Character and Environment. No matter it is in light of Jude, Sue, or Mr. Phillotson, you can hardly pinpoint any of their personality. When I was reading the first few pages of Jude the Obscure, I expected it would be similar to any biographic, or semi-biographic, novels in which the writer would bitterly write his unfortunately story in his early life, but by the staunchness of his mind he would
turn out decently well.
But as I read on I didn’t spot any trace of that. Instead Thomas Hardy paved such a road of suspense that you hardly knew what to expect next. After Jude divorced Arabella, and Sue Phillotson, who would expect they two didn’t go to get married? And after Jude and Sue finally had their children, who would expect that
the children would be killed and Sue would return to remarry Phillotson? The incredible plot, as Chosen by Thomas Hardy, shocked its readers; but on the other hand it was the unexpectedness that made the novel a shock,a masterpiece, and able to arouse the interest of readers even these days.
Once some critic compared Thomas Hardy’s novels with those of Jane Austen, saying, though both born in England, that the two writers had totally averse writing
styles. In Jane Austen’s works, everything always seemed idyllic, most of the
protagonists had the chance to repent and improve, and the scruples were more likely to be solved in the end. But in Thomas Hardy’s stories, you could almost only have the opposite to expect. The protagonist, like the innocent Tess in Tess
of the D’Urbervilles had to suffer no less when she was sixteen than after she
fully grew up. And then in Jude the Obscure, Jude had to suffer, though different types, the same extent of agony and misery when he had to marry Arabella and
when he stayed with Sue.
In Thomas Hardy’s novels, there were seldom the traces of harmony. But then as
one said before, like painting,every novel essentially is the self portrait of the writer. In this sense, I find it very hard, after reading his biography, not
to forgive Thomas Hardy’s mercilessness towards readers’expectation.
February 4th, 2007
|
轻松英语