Abstract

This essay analyzes the relationship between Richard Lovat Summers and Ben Cooley in D.H. Lawrence's 1922 novel "Kangaroo." It argues that the psychological dynamic of the relationship between the two men as presented by Lawrence reveals one of the deepest of human paradoxes - the simultaneous kinship and opposition at work in the bipolarity of philosophy and tyranny, individual independence and unconditional love, the quest for glory and for ultimate truth, and the demands of self-love and of love of mankind. The claim here is that Lawrence's "Kangaroo" is a classic literary statement of the role and meaning of "eros" in human life as played out in its most characteristic human expressions - art and philosophy on the one hand and politics and tyranny on the other.