The mood of Jude the Obscure is occasionally hopeful, but those moments of hope only underscore its more general sense of tragedy and the unfairness of Jude's apparently predestined failures. The reader begins the novel hoping for the best, as Jude determines to improve his situation and learn his way out of his limited horizons. As a young boy he thinks about his opportunities to escape the tiny village of his birth, musing after first seeing Christminster in Part 1, Chapter 3 that:
‘It is a city of light, ’ he said to himself.
‘The tree of knowledge grows there, ’ he added a few steps further on
‘It is a place that teachers of men spring from and go to.’
‘It is what you may call a castle, manned by scholarship and religion.’
After this figure he was silent a long while, till he added: ‘It would just suit me.’
This moment, where Jude appears to assess his hopes for the future and to make a plan to better himself is exciting for the reader. It encourages them to raise their expectations as he does. Jude seems committed to changing his circumstances and being one of the "men of learning" that lives in the "castle" that is "maintained by scholarship and religion. " This dream doesn't seem impossible at this early point.
However, this escape quickly begins to seem harder than Jude ever thought it could be. At a rapid pace, events stack upon one another and the mood becomes sadder and sadder. By the time Jude has been tricked into an unhappy marriage with the cruel and selfish Arabella Donn, the reader begins to feel a sense of despair in tune with the protagonist. The narrator repeatedly encourages the reader to consider that Jude's "fall" into marriage was ultimately a bad choice. Jude's new wife only cares about physical comfort and pleasure, distracting Jude from his desired life "of the mind." When she leaves and Jude begins studying again, the reader feels a sense of relief, as Jude has a chance to get back on track.
This is quickly dashed when Jude falls in love with his cousin Sue Bridehead, starting an entirely new tale of woe which soon coincides with his rejection from the university life he desires. Jude's relationships eventually lead to the murder-suicide of his children, his loss of faith in God, a painful separation from Sue, and his own lonely death. Essentially, the mood in this novel takes a serious downward spiral and has only rare and fleeting moments of happiness and satisfaction to keep the reader going. Things go from bad to worse; by the end of the novel, the reader is made to feel absolutely grim and hopeless. Jude is dead, Sue is miserable, and the only characters who are happy are those who have treated Jude poorly or ignored him.
