| D. H. Lawrence has been considered to be one of the greatest writers in 20th-century English literature. In the brief twenty or so years of Lawrence's working life, he had written more than ten novels and several volumes of short stories. Besides being a great novelist, Lawrence is also a proficient poet, a ombative essayist, an atmospheric travel-writer, and a prolific literary correspondent. Furthermore, he extends his talents to book-reviewing, translation, photographic discourse and painting. But it is in the novels that his true greatness lies, and on them that his reputation rests. His works has affected many people profoundly. This is as true today as it was when he was writing. I le has come a long way from his essentially working-class, provincial English upbringing. He tries to move beyond class, putting himself consciously outside society in order to be able to look in and analyze and write about what he sees.The essence of Lawrence's genius lies in his profound and often shrewd insight into human beings, in his awareness of the alienation of civilized man in whom all belief has died, and in his burning sympathy with the natural world. There are themes that run consistently throughout Lawrence's novels, that is. to expose the destructive effect of industrialization on human being's natural instinct, and to suggest the need to get beyond purely mental life into a realm of feeling of spontaneity, associated with the natural world. Civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct. The highly industrialized society has made man depend more and more on his rationality, will and intellect so as to obtain higher socialstatus, to achieve acknowledgement and success. Therefore, consciously or unconsciously, man constrains and neglects his demand for natural and sensual life. In them, body and mind have been tragically split. They are dehumanized by modernization, robbed of their jollity, and turned into mechanized likeness of real, complete human beings. Everyone living under capitalism experiences that sense of alienation.Lawrence believes that part of his function as a writer is to find out the way towards salvation for his generation. He thinks that the preoccupation of fiction writers is to nakedly reveal the unknown and ignored factors within one's soul so as to balance their profound split of personality. They should also endeavor to start a perpetual research on human nature, natural instinct and spiritual state. The wisdom of the blood, or the instincts, gives Lawrence's characters a harmonious relationship with the natural world. With the onset of industrialization, this is to change radically. Lawrence believes that individual sanity is achieved only by keeping in contact with the larger morality of life itself. The main channel of contact is through the "blood"-blood-consciousness rather than the purely mental life he associates with modern existence. He therefore uses the male heroes in his novels to convey and express vividly this profound writing theme.In this thesis, the male heroes in Lawrence's major novels (Paul and Morel in Sons and Lovers, Tom Brangwen and Little Tom in The Rainbow, Birkin and Gerald in Women in Love, and Mellors and Clifford in Lady Chatterleys Lover) fall into two sorts: Alienated Men and Sons of Nature. And a contrastive analysis is made between them. Although the Alienated Men have different destinies, they have a common characteristic: split in personality. Paul in Lawrence's early novel Sons and Lovers is a working-class boy who has class aspiration. Gerald, LittleTom and Clifford in his later novels are wealthy capitalists who are alienated by modernization into machines of money, coal and war. While Natural Sons are by nature anti-modern, uncontrolled by machine, acting by instinct and living in intimate contact with the natural world. They stand for the spontaneous life force. They fall into two parts: Morel in his early novels, who is tragically fated; Tom, Birkin and Mellors in his later novels, who have achieved happiness through...
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