Cool Cat

February 4 , 2008

Jude the Obscure is a melodramatic story of characters that are emotional wrecks. Reading this novel reminded me of my class last semester, Masterworks of Dostoevsky. Hardy’s characters remind me of Dostoevsky’s characters in The Idiot. They’re all melodramatic, they’re all insane, and they all end up alone and unhappy. But the two are written in completely different moods, just as the two classes and professors are different.

My Dostoevsky class was a rude awakening to me. The novels were extremely hard for me to read and write about because they were full of despair–there was no glimpse of hope in any of these characters. It was a lot like the class–there was no glimpse of hope with that gloomy professor. It was an emotionally burdening semester.

What I had expected was an inviting atmosphere where thoughts and ideas were shared and accepted. It was my first upper-division class at the University of Texas, I had just transferred from a small community college where I was used to strong student-professor relationships.

(portrait of Dostoevsky)

What I found instead was a professor that was as obnoxious and unrelenting as they come. Any time a student spoke, he’d say, “I see what you’re saying, but I don’t understand your logic.” At one point, he even told a student, “You’re bogged down in an illogical quagmire.” This infuriated me. The books were hard enough to read already without his complete dismissal of our thoughts and feelings, but he had to rub our noses in the dirt. It was a humbling experience, but I doubt I would go through the torture of that professor again.

But unlike The Idiot, I read Jude the Obscure as a black comedy. Maybe because I feel free to express myself in our class, or maybe because I’m longing and searching for what I was refused in the Dostoevsky class. I found the characters’ actions and thoughts absurd… they overreacted to everything, were extremely rash in all of their decisions, and were unable to cope with the consequences. While reading the book, my thoughts were similar to the above video. Yes, all characters in this book are extremely, “eeeeeeemooooooooooooo.”

“If we children was gone there’d be no trouble at all” (262). One of the craziest moments of the book was the death of all the children. I had the same feeling when watching the climax of Happiness… The pedophile father/husband is finally visited by the police–it’s the end of him. His life is destroyed, there’s nothing he can do to save himself. Failure is inevitable. You just know everything is falling apart. For some reason, this is slightly humorous (at least to me). The events and the actions aren’t, but the situation is.

When Sue cries out, “Oh, my comrade, our perfect union—our two-in-oneness—is now stained with blood!” I couldn’t help but sigh (265). I knew that the death of her children would be an emotional strain on her, but the way she reacted reminded me a lot of Arabella’s freak out at the beginning of the book–when Arabella runs into the street screaming about Jude, and a passerby says sarcastically, “Good Lord deliver us!” (57). This line was replaying in the back of my mind through out the novel as my palm went to my face in frustration and humiliation with the characters.

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College Dreams: Parts IV-VI

February 4 , 2008