SOURCE: "The Narrative Technique of The Rainbow," in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. V, No. 1, Spring, 1959, pp. 29-38.

In the following essay, Sale analyses Lawrence's use of an original narrative technique in The Rainbow, while commenting on "the marked inferiority" of the second half of the novel.

You mustn't look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character. There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we've been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single radically unchanged element.

This passage of a letter from D. H. Lawrence to Edward Garnett is often cited in connection with The Rainbow, the novel to which it presumably refers. Yet the task of finding literary means to break down "the old stable ego of character" would...