The tone of the novel is mournful, reflective and impassioned. From the beginning of Jude the Obscure, Hardy's third-person omniscient narrator rails against the cruelty and unfairness of Jude and Sue's world. They alternately poke fun at it and directly criticize the characters' circumstances. They also frequently interject to comment on things being unjust. This passionate advocacy isn't obvious right from the start, however.
At the beginning of the novel, the tone is briefly hopeful and curious, as the narrator (describing the actions of the younger Jude) outlines an aspirational time in the young man's life. They imply that, although it might be difficult, Jude might actually better himself if he works hard enough. In Part 1, Chapter 4, this hope is troubled by the narrator's descriptions of the chokingly small world Jude lives in, in which nothing ever changes and no-one helps:
As he had often done before, he pulled his hat over his face and watched the sun peering insidiously at him through the interstices of the straw. This was Latin and Greek, then, was it, this grand delusion! [...] Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were further advanced than those of his grammarian. But nobody did come, because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.
The sentiment "nobody did come, because nobody does" reflects the narrator's growing despair about Jude's situation. There is no ambient kindness in Jude's world. Everything he gets, the narrator implies, he will have to earn for himself. The direct address employed here is quite startling for the reader. From an omniscient narrator, the declaration that "nobody does" ever come to help seems damning and absolute.
Later in the novel, the tone becomes consistently morose, strident, and sad. The omniscient narrator appears to grow as depressed and discontented as Jude at the awful circumstances they must begin to recount. The tone of the novel from the end of Part One onwards echoes Hardy's own strong feelings about social injustice and the limitations placed on education and self-improvement by the British class system. By the end of the novel, when Jude has lost everything, the tone is achingly tragic. Even the narrator has "abandoned" Jude in his attic room in Christminster, leaving him to die alone. In the novel's final section, the narrator has withdrawn entirely from Jude, instead taking up Arabella's point of view as if to show how "obscure" the protagonist has truly become.
