Conclusion

Abstract

In Sons and Lovers Lawrence is concerned above all to offer a subtle, balanced and truthful account of a highly complex reality, and he does so through the integration of the formal elements of drama and poetry, the achievement of an organic unity, and the maintenance of an almost clinical artistic impersonality. Although the carefully sustained equilibrium between sympathy and judgement is occasionally disturbėd by authorial intrusions of the kind referred to earlier, when the narrator affirms that Morel had ‘denied the God in him’ (p. 102), or when we are informed that already, as he looks out of the window of the library reading-room, Paul was a ‘prisoner of industrialism’ (p. 131), such instances are rare, because this equipoise—this balanced view of every character, relationship and human situation—is an essential aspect of Lawrence’s art. It is manifested in the superbly realistic ambivalence of the novel’s conclusion, which is created by Lawrence’s emphasis on the almost overwhelming complexity of Paul’s final moral and instinctual choice.