Nasser DashtPeyma - Department of English,Tabriz Branch, Islamic Azad University,Tabriz,Iran
Leyli Jamali - Department of English,Tabriz Branch, Islamic Azad University,Tabriz,Iran
Masoumeh Nobakht - MA student,Department of English,Tabriz Branch, Islamic Azad University,Tabriz,Iran.

The paper aims to bring Levinasian insights in his Existence and Existents (2011) into conversation with Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895). The novel depicts one’s Being in all of its weight and horror. According to Hardy himself, this is a story of a deadly war waged between flesh and spirit. The endless grief of problems, obstacles and difficulties that characters encounter in the novel leads them to undergo the otherness of subject with his Being. Levinas believes that existence (being) always leads to something tragic. This tragic object is called Existence (Being). Through this Existence, one experiences the horror of Being which is eternal. So dying or committing suicide, is to seek an escape from Being, to go where freedom and negation operate but Levinas follows the impossibility of Death and the universality of Existence even in its annihilation . This is the starting point of what Levinas calls pains of Being . These pains manifest themselves as insomnia, fatigue, hypostasis, the distance between a being and Being, the desire to suspend Being, recognition of world's weariness and the eternal truth of there is Being . It means we plead with death, sleep or being unconsciousness to suspend from our being in the world.In Jude the Obscure, Hardy shows miserable fate of Jude and Sue which is doomed to pain. Throughout the novel Jude, Sue and Little Father Time - a child from Jude's first marriage -mention that they ought not to be born . Sue says it seems such a terribly tragic thing to bring beings into the world . This pain comes to its peak when Little Father Time, murders his half-siblings and commits suicide because he comes to believe that he and his half-siblings are the cause of the family's miseries.Sue leaves Jude to reduce her and her husband’s pains. But as Levinas writes pains of Being is everlasting. Jude says it is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live . Furthermore, Sue says it was better to be out of life than in it at this price .