Dh Lawrence Nightmare Analysis

In this essay I will analyse Nightmare, the twelfth chapter of D. H. Lawrence’s semi-autobiographical novel Kangaroo published in 1923. The period of the First World War was a grim time in the world history for many men, especially those who had to fight on the front and risk their lives for the benefit of their motherland. There are many sources of information where one can learn about those soldiers who participated in the Great War and how excruciatingly painful their experience was, or about the consequences which those brave warriors bore after the war had finished. However, the evidence about those who refused to perform military service and how it influenced them is quite scarce, or to put it more precisely, is less widespread. In the years of the First World War, refusing to fight was considered to be ignominious and degrading; such men were

Lawrence 's “Nightmare”). D. H. Lawrence had born the burden of the First World War in the same way as his “thinly disguised autobiographical narrator Richard Lovat Somers” (Reading Modernist Fiction as War Testimony: The Case of D.H. Lawrence 's “Nightmare”). The writer described Cornwall, “a place that had been isolated from encroaches of modern life and the evidence of its heritage – stretching back into pre-history – was still clearly displayed in its landscape”, so vividly because it had been his refuge during the war (Costin). For D. H. Lawrence the period of war was an onerous time: he “had been most directly affected by the war in having his work banned, and suffering persecution by the authorities as a suspected spy” (Creating a History: The Case for Lawrence as a Civilian War Writer). The bitterness of his memories of the First World War D. H. Lawrence vivivdly demonstrates on the pages of