on jude the obscure & unrequited love
I’ve finished Jude the Obscure, here are some thoughts:
This is a harrowing story about one man’s utter helplessness against the winds of destiny. Jude is an orphan boy with a vision and a passion for life that is cruelly challenged and ultimately crushed by forces beyond his control. His is a tale of fortune and fate, of desire and despair.
But what struck me most was what I took to be the novel’s sub-theme: unrequited love. I wonder if this is what Hardy sought to convey through his subtheme: that love, though it seeks to transcend the loneliness of life, is itself always a lonely endeavor--never fully mutual because it is inherently unequal.
And that might be the most heart-wrenching lesson of all.
This is a harrowing story about one man’s utter helplessness against the winds of destiny. Jude is an orphan boy with a vision and a passion for life that is cruelly challenged and ultimately crushed by forces beyond his control. His is a tale of fortune and fate, of desire and despair.
But what struck me most was what I took to be the novel’s sub-theme: unrequited love. I wonder if this is what Hardy sought to convey through his subtheme: that love, though it seeks to transcend the loneliness of life, is itself always a lonely endeavor--never fully mutual because it is inherently unequal.
And that might be the most heart-wrenching lesson of all.
posted by shoshana at 1:19 AM
5 Comments:
You make me realize that I may have lost my ability to fully appreciate the dark, depressing lessons of novels. Maybe it's because I'd prefer to read of real live experiences, struggles, and triumphs, rather than about some notions of life and love that live in the heads' (although perhaps not exclusively) of the genius, but often deranged writers of fiction. Or maybe too many years of technical education have reduced me to a being inapt of grasping artistic genius...Or just maybe it's because my interest in reading fiction has almost completely evaporated, and thus, not having read fiction in a while, I am not in the correct frame of mind for literary criticism...
well hketg, i don't think these feelings are exclusive to fiction or the world of art. art's just a medium for communicating what is real.
adam--agreed.
now pray tell why does your blog url not work? a link would be cool i dont need to know your 'real' name but i like blogsharing.
i don't think these feelings are exclusive to fiction or the world of art. art's just a medium for communicating what is real.
Oh, I didn't intend to infer that their lessons were imaginative, only that they tend to draw and dwell on, and at times magnify, the darker sides of life. I find that when I read non-fiction works, while there are often enough depressing elements, the overall lessons are not as dark, and I think, in many ways more applicable.
hketg: you didn't mean to imply, not infer. It was Adam that did the inferring.
But, I agree completely with sentiment. You are in precisely the right frame of mind, not for literary criticism, which is all about taking literature too seriously, but for rational criticism of literature, which puts it in its place.
In my adolosence, fiction was my world, but I seem to have outgrown it. Hence, I would say that fiction mirrors the intense, angst-fraught years of adolesence, where one lives deep in his mind of highly stylized thought, untainted by actual experience, more than "real" life.
And yes, bits 'n peices, you make me realize just how much I've lost the ability to appreciate that.
The truth is, though, that when I read a really good book, I am transported straight back to that time of untainted imagination, where intense emotional drama colors all of life and love
anon:
i'm sorry you've lost that ability. you equate literary criticism with a deep appreciation, mistakenly, i think.
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