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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text's major themes.
Content warning: The following contains references to sexual abuse and self-harm.
Bodies of Water
Bodies of water recur in the imaginations of Jude, Willem, and JB. The symbolism in these images ranges from the weightlessness of floating to the threat of drowning, with the common thread being a lack of control. JB feels a “watery rush of happiness . . . as if an ocean were rising up in his chest” when he compares his family with those of his friends, realizing how lucky he is to be surrounded by unconditional love. For Willem, water has a dual meaning. It is both the stream of fate on which he and his career float and the attendant possibilities that the world has to offer. For example, Willem wishes that his parents had some spark of imagination, which he compares to a stream with various beautiful living things inside of it. When Willem transitions from college to career, he feels as though he is “bobbing from bank to bank in a muck-bottomed pond,” unable to tell “whether the lake he was in opened up into a river or whether it was contained.” The water itself is not threatening, although the uncertainty is discomfiting. At times, however, when his career prospects seem dim, Willem feels that the “lake is very empty,” and he longs for the certainty of a home and a family. But later, when Willem makes a home with Jude, he feels his happiness “like water in a bright blue kettle.”
For Jude, water is far more complicated. He has the river of Harold and Julia’s friendship on which he floats and the lake at Lantern House in which Willem and Jude swim naked after Jude’s legs are amputated. However, Jude also depicts his pain as a river upon which he floats or an ocean in which he drowns. Especially after Jude loses Willem, he increasingly feels adrift. Jude expresses this ambivalence when he is about to embark on a relationship with Caleb, comparing his current situation to a dripping faucet and a potential relationship to “waves, tumult, rainstorms.” Connection is “everything he has lived his adult life trying to avoid, everything whose absence bleeds his life of color.” Water is mutable, so it can be slow and steady, or it can be terrible, and Jude fully immerses himself in both possibilities. In another state, water turns solid, and Jude imagines himself trapped in the blocks of ice that are sometimes his pain and sometimes his unspoken memories. But at the novel’s end, Harold contemplates the possibilities of Jude’s presence in “that cloud, that wave, that rain, that mist.”
Forests
Forests are dichotomous places in which life both thrives and rots. At the monastery, Brother Luke ran the greenhouse, and he taught Jude about the world of plants. He also painted a future for Jude of their lives together in a house in a forest by a lake, and that future sustained Jude throughout many years of abuse. Jude eventually inhabits that future with Willem at Lantern House, where he relaxes with his friends and his life partner, but also where he collapses on the forest floor, too weak to walk the short distance back to the house. The forest kept Jude safe when he ran away from the home in Montana, but it also stopped him from making sufficient progress, forcing him to leave it and sell his body for transport. During his episodes, when Jude nearly ceases to be human, he imagines that he belongs to the forest as a way of grounding himself both in the world and outside of his body. And from that same forest emerges the demon Caleb, slipping into Jude’s life to destroy it.
The small, natural objects that are found in the forest, that are its products and its substance, are treasures to Jude, “stones and feathers and arrowheads,” “little rocks; a branch that was shaped a bit like a lean dog in mid-leap.” As a child, these were the only possessions Jude could claim and he held them like religious relics. Brother Luke knows this about Jude and adds to his treasure trove, thus ensuring a place in Jude’s heart, so the boy trusts Luke enough to leave the monastery with him. Only later does Jude realize that the gifts Luke gave him were broken toys, incomplete and ill-functioning. As an adult, he works with similar objects in Richard’s studio, “twigs and stones and dried beetles and feathers and tiny, bright-hued taxidermied birds and blocks in various shapes made of some soft pale wood,” where he finds the peace to prevent him from cutting himself. Like the forest, Jude is a complex landscape that is filled with life but in a constant state of decay.
The Monster Inside
Inside Jude lives a pain-driven creature that is the metaphorical embodiment of his self-loathing and the unfathomable torture he’s endured throughout his life, and it forces him to enact horrific violence upon himself. Jude remains constantly aware of this beast, always vigilant for triggers that might cause it to surface. Being around his college roommates is sometimes a trigger, as are the questions that Harold asks about his past. Such interactions make him wary and distrustful, traits that he knows can make him difficult to love. After letting Caleb into his life, Jude finds that the “beast” has surfaced, and memories of his past torment him, haunting not only his nightmares but his waking hours, so that he constantly relives his childhood. He searches for ways to quiet these memories, and although cutting helps, he believes the only way to truly satiate the monster is to destroy himself. Willem’s presence both helps and hurts. The love and attention that Willem gives Jude distract him from the memories, but their sexual relationship unleashes all of the agonizing physical and emotional reactions he had as a child. Only after Jude confesses to Willem what Caleb did to him and the abuse he endured as a child and young man does the monster inside finally slink away, beaten back by Jude’s courageous decision to trust Willem with his most painful secrets, and to accept Willem’s unconditional love.
