Instant Resources for The Blind Man by D. H. Lawrence!
Whether you're looking for a short story to pair with the novel you're teaching, or you need a 2- to 3-day sub plan to use with the stories in your textbooks, Prestwick House Instant Short Story Packs go beyond basic comprehension to help students learn how to analyze literature.
Each downloadable pack addresses key skills through 5-10 standards-based analysis questions by guiding students through a series of scaffolding graphic organizers and in-class activities.
This Instant Short Story Pack for The Blind Man by D. H. Lawrence includes:
- Scaffolding graphic organizers and in-class activities
- Standards-based objectives
- Introduction and pre-reading notes
- Complete short story text
- Rigorous analysis questions
- Detailed teacher's answer guide
About The Blind Man
“The Blind Man” was first published in July 1920 in the English Review. Lawrence later included it in his ten-story collection England, My England, which was published in the United States in 1922 and England in 1924. It did not attract much critical or popular attention, and even today, it remains one of Lawrence’s lesser-known stories.
It is significant mostly because it illustrates Lawrence’s fascination with what he called “blood consciousness.” In his works, and especially in letters to fellow writers and philosophers, Lawrence used the terms “mental consciousness” and “blood consciousness” to distinguish between rational thought and instinct, between what one sees and hears and how one perceives it. In a 1913 letter, he wrote, “my great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true” (The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: Volume 1, September 1901 May 1913, p.503).
This distinction is apparent in this story’s many contrasts—Maurice and Bertie, the house and the barn, light and dark, sight and blindness, and polite superficiality and brutal intimacy. For Lawrence, it is this almost savage unconscious experience that makes a person human. In some of his other stories and novels, his exploration of this aspect of human nature is often derided as vulgar. The life-changing encounter between Maurice and Bertie in “The Blind Man” may have troubled some readers, but it did not cause the outrage that some of the rest of his work did.