SOURCE: "D. H. Lawrence and Ontological Insecurity," in PMLA, Vol. 89, No. 1, January, 1974, pp. 154-63.

In the following essay, Kleinbard undertakes a psychological analysis of Will Brangwen.

Lawrence's warning to Edward Garnett not to look for "the old stable ego of the character" in The Rainbow has been a road sign for many commentaries on characterization in that and later novels. In his letter to Garnett he defines his departure from conventional fiction as the portrayal of "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."

It is a mistake to conclude from these remarks that Lawrence has not created recognizable personality configurations in The Rainbow. The novel shows a further development of the extraordinary understanding...