Abuse

The novel’s depiction of abuse is vital to understanding Jude’s character arc, for not only does Jude undergo years of extreme physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, but the timing and chronology of these abuses determine how deeply formative they are for his psyche. Beginning in Jude’s infancy, he was raised in a Catholic monastery in South Dakota; the men at the monastery claimed to have found him abandoned. Jude lived at the monastery until age eight, and he suffered severe and varied forms of abuse. Two forms of abuse were physical and emotional: “They hit him with whatever they could find…they called him a monster, they wished for his death” (149). Also, as the reader later learns, he was also sexually abused, as several of the men repeatedly raped him. Thus, the entirety of Jude’s early childhood was defined by every form...