The preceding chapters have shown how the thematising of language in Lawrence's novels reflects their changing narrative ontology; their representation of different ‘worlds’. The discussion has encompassed in turn: the sentimental projection of The White Peacock; the romantic identification of The Trespasser; the struggle for impersonality in Sons and Lovers; the evolving ontology of The Rainbow from mythic continuity to a psychological and individuated symbolism; the constituted ‘worlds’ of Women in Love; the self-conscious dissolution of form in Aaron's Rod and Kangaroo for which their language provides the microcosmic rationale; the attempted holism of The Plumed Serpent leading to a new kind of sentimental projection and an unwitting parody of the Lawrencean metaphysic; and finally the humorous acceptance of self-consciousness in Lady Chatterley's Lover with its partial return to the narrative method of Mr Noon.

There is an overall rationale to the sequence. In the early novels we can see Lawrence feeling his way towards his mature metaphysic in which the impersonal dimension of feeling arises from an equivalent ontological posture; an openness to Being in the ‘other’. In The Rainbow this ontology was subtly re-created in a modern language but attributed to the early Brangwens as an unconscious dimension of their being. Thus it was comprehensible to us without falsification. But increasingly Lawrence's desire to reconcile this ontological vision with a highly self-conscious modern sensibility produced rhetorical, and generic, strains which are in themselves perhaps a profound vindication of his central theme: that a crucial and saving experience of Being is indeed incompatible with a representative modern mentality. His rhetorical failures, in other words, are no necessary reflection on the significance of the vision itself.