D.H. Lawrence stands out as one who lived with a fierce intensity and whose stormy, passionate nature could tolerate no external control. His first novel, The White Peacock, shows his awareness of the social influences that operate to thwart the natural play of instinct and affinity. He explores what are relatively unknown modes of being, character at the unconscious level, at the depths, and in the darkness.
Lawrence is interested in the quality of feeling in human life. Believing "the old, stable ego" to be an illusion, he rejects the literary tradition, which assigns to each person a fixed and definite character. That is the reason why his characters are not always consistent. In the novel Sons and Lovers, the characters are less complete in their detail; there is a blur in many of them so that we are not sure of the focus; but they are life-size. Lawrence in his characters is not much the social man, though he is interested in him, as the seven-eight of the iceberg of personality submerged and never seen.