A Loner’s Struggling Existence

Jude the Obscure was Thomas Hardy’s last novel, and arguably his most criticized novel. Inthe Victorian Age, common readers were used to stories in which people are treated justly, bejustly rewarded for their kindness or justly punished for their ill deeds. In Hardy’s lifetime,comments on the Jude the Obscure reveal the struggles between the old and new values andsocial culture in the late Victorian society, after that review focuses on criticism of feminismand formalism. In the late1970s, as the rise of literary theory, Jude the Obscure became theobject for a variety of literary theory and thoughts, and broke the domination of feminism andformalist criticism. A lot of critics were also concerned about the topic which talked aboutnovel intersexuality and the relationship with other art forms. In recent years, cultural studieswere the comments’ mainstream on Jude the Obscure. The critics had given analysis to thevarious cultural phenomena of the fiction texts. This thesis thus intends to do a study on theprotagonist Jude of Jude the Obscure with Sartre’s existentialism, exposing Jude’s difficulties andexploring the significance of his existence.This thesis includes six chapters. The first chapter provides an overview of Hardy’s life,and major responses to Jude the Obscure, as well as an introduction of the content. Thesecond chapter briefly introduces Sartre’s existentialism and Hardy’s existentialconsciousness in the novel. The third chapter discusses Jude’s existence which is reflected inhis marriage and love. The following chapter analyzes Jude’s solitude in the Victorian crisis offaith and his rootlessness in the alienated environment. The fifth chapter argues that althoughJude spends entire life striving for living, career and love, and is disillusioned and dies lonelyin the end, he never gives up and eventually finds the true self. The last part concludes thatJude makes his free choices to try to realize his dreams and find the true “I”, even though heis doomed to fail. This is the message from Satire’s existentialism and also what this thesishopes to convey: no matter how harsh the conditions are, we need to have hope, we need totake the responsibility of self-selection in order to realize self-value.