RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

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but he must go on till he finds death.
Weakness wraps around
him as he walks and "He only wanted to go on, to go on whilst
he could, to move, to keep going, that was all, until it was
finished. He had lost all his sense of place..." (p.465). As
he walks, a fear of his own death, or murder appears to his
mind as if to prove Birkin's theory of the victim and the
victimizer.
Gerald meets a symbol of his own life-sacrifice:
It was a half buried crucifix, a little Christ
under a little sloping hood at the top of the
pole. He sheered away. Somebody was going to
murder him. He had a great dread of being
murdered... (ibid).
The irony of this 'little Christ1 and Gerald's fear of being
murdered is that in a way Gerald associates his own death with
Christ's.
Christ was murdered and Gerald, in his suicide, will
be both his own murderer and at the same time the murderee.
He
is the victim and the victimizer.
Finally, in the 'cradle of
snow', in the cul-de-sac, he finds an icy womb to curl in like a
frozen foetus:
He had come to the hollow basin of snow,
surrounded by sheer slopes and precipices, out
of which rose a track that brought one to the
top of the mountain. But he wandered
unconsciously, till he slipped and fell down,
and as he fell something broke in his soul, and
immediately he went to sleep (p.466).
When the frozen body is found, Gudrun seems to feel nothing,
as if she were cold and hollow.
She telegraphs to Birkin and
Ursula who come as soon as they can.
Gudrun feels somehow
auilty, as implied by the question she asks Loerke: "'We haven't
killed him?'" (p.466).
It is interesting to notice that Gudrun
also blames Loerke.
She will not bear the guilt alone.
As soon as Birkin meets Gudrun, she immediately feels
guilty: "She knew he knew" (p.467).
But Birkin is too much