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the beginning of the novel neither she nor Birkin, nor for that matter anybody else, has any idea of what love means. Thus, as in Hamlet, in which the reader is invited to explore with the protagonist a variety of moral issues from the nature of duty and responsibility to the nature of love and friendship, Lawrence takes his characters on a voyage of self-discovery concerning the nature of love. He also invites the reader, and most of all himself, on that same and all-important journey. Novelist and critic Anthony Burgess has understood well Lawrence’s quality of using the novel to explore truth. In a very insightful comparison of the prose of Joyce and Lawrence, Burgess observes:
    Stylistically, Joyce is drawn to economy and exactness, Lawrence to a diffuseness that looks for what he is trying to say while he is saying it. No potential writer would ever take Lawrence as a model; Ulysses is a textbook of literary technique (Burgess, Flame into Being, pp. 4-5).
    Ursula feels “some kinship” with Birkin, a “tacit understanding, a using the same language,” but she is unwilling to romanticize her feelings. And, since Ursula dislikes Hermione and feels somewhat intimidated by her, though she does everything in her power to resist it, her interest in Birkin seems initially, at least in part, to be piqued by the possibility of doing Hermione a bad turn. In any case, her interest in Birkin is certainly not motivated by a desire to complete herself. Ursula would find the idea of needing a man to complete oneself repulsive and outdated. However, if the traditional motive of marriage as self-interest and security is dismissed, and if the concept of needing a man to complete oneself is dismissed, what can be the basis on which to reinvent modern love? Lawrence is not writing a pot-boiler. His characters must struggle to arrive at the truth, as one does in real life. In the chapter “An Island,” in which Ursula and Birkin are apart and isolated from the world like a new Adam and a new Eve, it is clear that Ursula believes in love. Though she is intrigued by Birkin’s scandalous and fanciful ideas of a world without humanity or individual love, she forces him to concede the fact that he does believe in love and loves humanity. Birkin’s reluctance to share in the love of humanity has everything to do with the hypocrisy of humanity itself in the name of love. Though Ursula is unwilling to throw out love because others have eroded its meaning, she shares Birkin’s sense of the shallowness and stupidity of love in modern times and therefore encourages him in his fantasies. The bond is thus established. They are united by the search for a love that is not love as it is presently constituted. Without ever directly stating it, by the end of the chapter, Ursula and Birkin have opened themselves to the possibilities of being united forever.
    In the chapter entitled “Moony,” Birkin and Ursula get down to the complexities of defining love both for themselves and for our age. “I want you to serve my spirit,” Ursula tells Birkin. This sounds to him too much like traditional love, and he rejects it out of hand:
    “I know you do. I know you don’t want physical things by themselves. But, I want you to give me—to give your spirit to me....” ...
    “But, how can I, you don’t love me! ...” ...
    “It is different,” he said. “The two kinds of service are so different. I serve you in another way—not through yourself,-somewhere else. But I want us to be together without bothering about ourselves—to be really together because we are together....”
    “No,” she said, pondering. “You are just egocentric. You never have any enthusiasm, you never come out with any spark towards me. You want yourself, really, and your own affairs. And you want me just to be there, to serve you” (pp. 249-250).
    If the language is vague, at times even nonsense, it is the language of everyday life, particularly as it relates to love. It