ABSTRACT
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom presents us with descriptions of movements through the Arabian desert, military encounters, portraits of Arab and English personalities, interspersed with passages of reflection and introspection in which the phrasing and the sequence of thoughts seem deliberately tortured into obscurity. There is no clear exposition of motives in Seven Pillars. Elsewhere Lawrence did explain himself in transparent prose, but he provided a multiplicity of motives in an unconvincing hierarchy of "order of strength" that presents the reader with the classic problem of overdetermination. Lawrence is by no means the classical hero who desires to perform courageous deeds in the eyes of gods and men. Lawrence wanted the experience of heroic courage but was ambivalent about its fame-making worldly consequences. Suffering was not simply thrust upon Lawrence, it was a condition of his own creation. There is considerable evidence that Lawrence arranged and submitted himself to periodic beatings on other occasions.
