SOURCE: Doherty, Gerald. “The Art of Survival: Narrating the Nonnarratable in D. H. Lawrence's ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’.” The D. H. Lawrence Review 24, no. 2 (summer 1992): 117-26.

In the following essay, Doherty elucidates Lawrence's inventive narrative strategies in “The Man Who Loved Islands.”

What to write now? Can you still write anything? One writes with one's desire, and I am not through desiring.

(Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes.)

In Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks has offered one of the most acute and attractive accounts of desire in narrative. For Brooks, desire is like Eros: it fuels our projects towards the world, including the project of telling stories that explain or interpret the world. As these stories unfold, they shape our desires, especially in relation to time: they impose a pattern of beginnings, middles, and ends. As embodiments of these desires, the protagonists of these stories are driven...