Character Analysis
Jude is one of the most fully realized characters in contemporary fiction and one of the most withholding. We spend hundreds of pages inside his consciousness without ever receiving a complete account of himself — he does not have one to give. His name is significant: Jude, patron saint of lost causes; St. Francis, the saint of compassion for living things. He is brilliant, beautiful, and comprehensively damaged, and the novel's insistence that these things coexist — that damage does not diminish the person — is its central ethical claim.
How They Speak
Formal, precise, slightly detached — a prose style learned rather than inherited, the speech of someone who assembled language as a tool rather than receiving it as a birthright.