How can you describe Jude from Jude the Obscure?

Jude, the protagonist of the novel, is a conflicted
person. However, the conflicts that exist within his character at the outset of the
novel appear to be very different from those that conflict him in the
end. 

Early on, Jude is a person without a place. His
parents are gone and he is left to live with an aunt. The aunt does not particularly
like him. Jude recognizes his position with blunt honesty and without bitterness. He is
driven to dream of finding a place for himself; to dream of rising up in the world. How
to achieve this dream is his first conflict. 

However, this
conflict fades when he meets Sue. Jude allows his first and greatest dream (with its
attached challenges) to fall away and he takes up a new challenge, one of
love. 

Sue teaches Jude that his former, uncritical moral
views are not the only views available. More nuances and independent views exist.
Eventually, Jude adopts these views, but not without turmoil along the
way. 

These changes in Jude serve as the undercurrent of
the novel. In these changes, we see Judes' constant search for a place in the world and
for self-value. The novel, when seen this way, becomes the story of one man's emotional
maturation as he grows from a position of automatic conformity to social norms into a
precarious independence of moral thought. 

In particular,
this is the story of a set of characters who find self-defintion in the process of
coming to terms with one of society's most pervasive and important
institutions:

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The wrestling over the issue of marriage that
takes place in Jude the Obscure is in a larger sense a function of
the definition of the self which takes place throughout the nineteenth
century.

The conflicts taking
place within Jude (as well as within Sue and Phillotson) are concerned with the dynamics
of self-definition and identity, especially as identity can be seen to be a balance
between the individual and soceity.