Jude’s status as a static protagonist makes his characterization both frustrating and sympathetic. His extraordinarily low self-worth, informed by a childhood rife with abuse, never budges throughout the novel, despite extensive efforts to help him from a loving community of friends. Named for a martyr of the early Christian church, Jude often appears saint-like both in his level of suffering and in his gentleness, but his saintly kindness comes from a conviction that he could lose his friends’ love at any moment rather than a genuine absence of any anger.

Jude’s childhood consists of an endless string of sexual abuse, from his years as a foundling in a monastery to his time on the road with predatory ex-monk Brother Luke to his years in a home for children without parents to his months held in captivity by the sadistic Dr. Traylor. Without being told, he realizes that there is something wrong with what he is being forced to do, but he wrongly assumes that the fault is his rather than his despicable caretakers’. Because Dr. Traylor runs over Jude with a car, Jude’s psychological trauma is paired with lasting physical damage to his back and legs that plagues him for the rest of his life.

Although Jude accomplishes an astonishing amount of success, eventually becoming a wealthy litigator in one of New York City’s top law firms, he is ultimately more noteworthy for what he does not do than for what he does: Jude never recovers. Despite his enormous wealth, despite his network of close friends, despite even being adopted by his former law school professor, he can never accept that the image of himself as essentially worthless and loathsome that he formed during childhood is wrong.

At multiple points in the novel—such as his adoption, his decision to finally reveal the full story of his past to his partner, or his effort to participate in therapy voluntarily—the reader might think that Jude has at last reached a turning point and will begin the long process of self-acceptance. Instead, however, Yanagihara offers an unusual protagonist: one who never completes a redemptive arc and who dies having never found healing from his vast, overwhelming trauma.

Despite the many difficulties of companionship with Jude, William is Jude’s closest friend, staunchest defender, and eventual romantic partner. While no character’s past rivals Jude’s in trauma, Willem’s past is not without its own tragedy: He was raised by emotionally distant parents, and his beloved older brother, Hemming, died of complications from cerebral palsy during Willem’s college years. Jude often suspects that Willem may love him only out of pity because Jude reminds him of Hemming. Whatever the source of Willem’s love for Jude, however, its power and steadfastness are beyond doubt.

The tension that animates Jude and Willem’s relationship is Jude’s unwillingness to reveal his whole self to Willem and Willem’s inability to know how to handle Jude’s trauma. Jude constantly hides truths or outright lies to Willem. He does not open up about his past trauma for decades; he continuously lies about his continued cutting; he struggles to even remove his shirt in front of Willem out of shame for his scarred arms and back. Willem meets all of this withholding with love. He respects Jude’s boundaries—arguably to a fault. Only late in the novel does he begin pushing Jude’s boundaries, and even then he cannot figure out whether this is the right thing to do or if he is only causing Jude to retreat further into himself. Although Willem is a wildly successful actor who moves between blockbusters and critically praised independent films with ease, he has none of the egotism usually associated with actors, instead devoting himself to Jude.

If Willem is guilty of anything, it is of having too much confidence that his love can heal Jude. Willem’s death near the end of the novel proves to be Jude’s breaking point; while Jude only ever clung to life half-heartedly before Willem’s death, he forfeits the attempt after, having lost the love of his life.

While most main characters in the novel show an almost superhuman devotion to Jude, JB offers an effective contrast as a man not insensitive to Jude but more self-absorbed than the rest of Jude’s coterie. Because of this characterization, he undergoes the most significant transformation in the novel, moving from a witty but sometimes cruel young man to a more measured, gracious man by the novel’s end. He is also the only one of the original group of four from Part 1 to survive the entire novel.

Raised by a large group of extended female relations, JB enjoys boundless confidence, the only one of Jude’s original four college friends not mired in self-doubt or identity crisis as a young man. Although he takes longer to reach fame and fortune than the other three, his career as a painter eventually takes off, propelling him to the level of professional success that his friends enjoy in their fields.

While JB does not verbalize his love for his friends often, his paintings speak for him: He paints Malcolm, Jude, and Willem almost exclusively, making a career out of transforming photos of the friends into stunning thematic collections. His artistic renderings express what he cannot in words, revealing all the beauty he sees in his friends, especially Jude, who cannot square his own self-perception with JB’s renderings of him. Although one of Jude’s lowest points as an adult comes from a cruel impression of his disability that JB performs while in the throes of drug addiction, JB eventually redeems himself with subsequent faithfulness to Jude.

Although Malcolm Irvine is probably the man in Jude’s original friend group the readers get to know the least, he maintains a steady caring presence in Jude’s life until his death in the same car accident that kills Willem. He comes from the most affluent and the most traditionally stable background of any of the four boys, with parents who may pressure him to achieve success but nevertheless love him. As a young man in college, he struggles to find a sense of identity, particularly when JB’s challenges to his Blackness lead him to question what his biracial identity means to him. He also questions his own sexuality for many years before finally deciding he is straight and marrying a woman named Sophie. This tendency toward indecision follows him throughout his life, but Jude enjoys being able to offer advice to his friend when it comes to questions of marriage and children because it allows him a relationship in which he can give rather than just receive care.

That said, Malcolm does follow the pattern of friends in Jude’s life who go to great lengths to care for him. When Malcolm catapults to international fame in the architecture world, he always makes time for special projects for Jude, including renovations of his loft and construction of a summer house. Malcolm designs these spaces with Jude’s increasing immobility in mind, offering accessible features and plenty of wide spaces in which a wheelchair can turn. In this way, Malcolm’s designs are pivotal in helping Jude to accept that he has a disability rather than just some temporary pain that will eventually go away. Although Malcolm’s death gets somewhat overshadowed by Willem’s death because of Willem’s primal importance to Jude, the deaths of Willem, Malcolm, and Malcolm’s wife all at once mark a harrowing tragedy in the novel’s progression.

A brilliant and lauded law professor, Harold Stein quickly recognizes something special in law student Jude and embarks on a mentor/mentee relationship with him. As the years progress, the two grow so close that Harold and his wife, Julia, adopt Jude, despite the fact that Jude is already 30 years old. While Harold says the advantage of legal adoption lies in inheritance, the reader can see the adoption is about more than passing down money: Even though Jude will not tell Harold the details of his past, Harold senses the traumatic void of a parent’s unconditional love.

Harold lost a son to a rare neurodegenerative disease at the age of five, so his attachment to Jude may in part be an effort to have the relationship with an adult child of which he was so cruelly deprived. However, Harold attaches to Jude out of more than merely a desire to replace a lost son. He realizes that Jude has both great needs and great talents. He nurtures Jude’s self-confidence and his professional acumen, although only one of these efforts has lasting effects.

Much like Willem, Harold’s constant concern when dealing with Jude is not knowing how to help him. He, too, hesitates to push Jude too far toward more open communication but continuously worries that he is not pushing him far enough. Toward the end of the novel, Jude’s long-repressed anger finally emerges, but Harold and Julia meet it with love. Tragically, their devotion is never enough to overcome Jude’s trauma: Even in his suicide letter to them relating the details of his horrific past, he apologizes, convinced that his story will render him disgusting in their eyes.

Jude’s college friend and primary physician, Andy is an orthopedic surgeon who takes care of all Jude’s many medical needs. Because he needs to know Jude’s medical history to treat him, he learns some vague details about Jude’s past experiences with abuse before any other major character. For this reason, Jude refuses to see any physician other than Andy except in life-or-death scenarios; he cannot bear to entrust the truth of his past to another person.

Due to his need to examine various parts of Jude’s body, Andy also becomes aware of how serious and constant Jude’s cutting addiction is before any other character, and at various points he also notices alarming weight loss due to Jude’s poor eating habits. His response to such self-harm is characterized by indecision and hesitancy; while he constantly threatens Jude with involuntary commitment to a psychiatric hospital if he does not stop his destructive behavior, he instead only takes half-measures, such as keeping records of how much Jude has cut each week. As a result, Andy spends most of the novel ridden with guilt, trying to determine if taking a firmer stance would help or hurt his patient. Despite his frustrations, he proves himself a loyal and caring friend, keeping Jude’s confidences and helping him navigate his near-constant ailments.