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Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.
Content Warning: The following contains references to sexual abuse, domestic violence, and rape.
Brother Luke
As one of the first people to abuse Jude, Brother Luke becomes a symbol for all the trauma that Jude experiences throughout his life. Before the reader knows anything about Brother Luke, his name is invoked in the narrative as part of Jude’s litany of trauma. In Jude’s memories and nightmares, Brother Luke is ubiquitous and monstrous. However, when he is introduced, he is the epitome of kindness, acting as a refuge for Jude in the monastery. Brother Luke lives alone in the greenhouse, and he teaches Jude about plants and nature, becoming a sort of fairy-tale figure like the witch in Hansel and Gretel. Even when Brother Luke lures Jude from the monastery, Brother Luke educates him and makes sure he exercises, tending to him with care—before sexually abusing him and forcing him to prostitute himself. Evil disguised as kindness becomes a warning sign for Jude, so that any time someone treats him tenderly, Jude is conditioned to believe that he will be hurt. Brother Luke and the abuse he perpetrates infect Jude’s soul with fear and distrust, an act that ultimately proves fatal.
Jude’s Wheelchair
Jude treats his wheelchair with the same ambivalence, reluctance, and disgust that he has for his own body. As a young man, Jude views the wheelchair as a nuisance. The wheelchair is cumbersome and necessitates a home with a working elevator, which Jude cannot always afford in New York City. Later, it becomes a determining factor in his life, much like having children determines the life path of many of his friends. When the elevator in Lispenard Street breaks down, Jude must drag not only his body but also his wheelchair up the four flights to his apartment, and the effort breaks him, forcing him to find a new place to live. And while the apartment on Greene Street has a reliable, industrial elevator, the wheelchair still finds a way to haunt him when Jude enters a relationship with Caleb, who sees it as a sign of weakness. Jude uses it when he cannot feel his feet, and for that Caleb beats and rapes him. On another occasion, after a similarly brutal encounter, Caleb treats the wheelchair with the same vehement anger he unleashes on Jude, kicking it down the stairs after him and mangling it in the process. When Jude must use the wheelchair in the courtroom, he relies upon his tailored suits and his icy professional demeanor to overpower the image of weakness that he believes the wheelchair creates.
JB’s Art Series
The artwork that JB creates during the novel reflects the way he understands and appreciates the people in his life. Although JB matures as an artist and a friend over the course of the novel, his raw material remains the same. He uses his friends and family as springboards for his portraits. Initially, these are merely exploitative, and his friends take him to task for betraying Jude through the unauthorized use of his likeness in his artwork. Over time, the work becomes less about the raw material and more about what JB creates from it. When JB concentrates on the image selection, the exhibit composition, and the paint’s colors and textures, he begins to earn the acclaim he has always garnered. In his final series sets, JB finally moves past representation into imagination, depicting what life might have been like between his mother and father and between Jude and Willem, had either JB’s father or Willem lived. In these works, JB demonstrates not the young men he is so privileged to call friends, nor the physical beauty of youth, even youth in pain, but the deep love to which people can commit and that can last even after death through art, imagination, and longing.
