How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
The coat with which they had covered the body fell off as they awkwardly turned through the two doorways, and the women saw their man, naked to the waist, lying stripped for work. The old woman began to moan in a low voice of horror. (2.85)
The weird choice to identify Walt as "their man" is one of many moments in which Lawrence distances the reader from the person described and/or deemphasizes that person's status as an individual.
Quote #2
"Never knew such a thing in my life, never! He'd no business to ha' been left. I never knew such a thing in my life! Fell over him clean as a whistle, an' shut him in. Not four foot of space, there wasn't—yet it scarce bruised him." (2.90)
Perhaps the story's obsession with distance and alienation has something to do with the very literal separation that kills Walter. As a result of some kind of cave-in, he ends up walled off from the rest of the world—and his oxygen supply.
Quote #3
And she knew what a stranger he was to her. In her womb was ice of fear, because of this separate stranger with whom she had been living as one flesh. Was this what it all meant—utter, intact separateness, obscured by heat of living? (2.128)
Walt's death makes Elizabeth feel completely alienated, like she never even really knew her husband. She even feels completely separate from the fetus that is growing inside her, which is pretty extreme—after all, they're sharing a body and a food supply . . . how separate can they be?
Quote #4
There had been nothing between them, and yet they had come together, exchanging their nakedness repeatedly. Each time he had taken her, they had been two isolated beings, far apart as now. He was no more responsible than she. The child was like ice in her womb. For as she looked at the dead man, her mind, cold and detached, said clearly: "Who am I? What have I been doing? I have been fighting a husband who did not exist. HE existed all the time. What wrong have I done? What was that I have been living with?" (2.128)
In starkly unromantic terms, Elizabeth contemplates her married life with Walter. She appears to believe that death has shown her the true nature of their relationship, namely that they were two strangers who had sex and thought (mistakenly, in her view now) it was something more than that. You can probably understand why she'd find the thought upsetting, as until just a few minutes ago, she thought she knew her husband pretty well.
Quote #5
And now she saw, and turned silent in seeing. For she had been wrong. She had said he was something he was not; she had felt familiar with him. Whereas he was apart all the while, living as she never lived, feeling as she never felt. (2.128)
Now Elizabeth beats herself up for thinking that she knew more about Walter than she now believes she did, seeming to think that she did him some kind of disservice or violence in her mistake.
Quote #6
In fear and shame she looked at his naked body, that she had known falsely. And he was the father of her children. Her soul was torn from her body and stood apart. She looked at his naked body and was ashamed, as if she had denied it. After all, it was itself. (2.129)
Oddly, Walt's death seems to have caused Elizabeth to have an out-of-body experience; at this moment, she sees everything through the lens of a grief-induced distance. In her view from "above," she has done her late husband wrong by failing to recognize who he truly was, and she feels actively ashamed of her failure.
Quote #7
She looked at his face, and she turned her own face to the wall. For his look was other than hers, his way was not her way. (2.129)
Elizabeth is horrified by how different and separate her husband is from her.
Quote #8
He had been cruelly injured, this naked man, this other being, and she could make no reparation. There were the children—but the children belonged to life. This dead man had nothing to do with them. (2.130)
Hmmm, now Elizabeth is suggesting that her husband is so alienated from everything and everyone (by virtue of being dead) that he has "nothing to do" with his children because they are alive. We understand that everyone copes with grief differently, but even then, this seems pretty extreme . . .
Quote #9
The children had come, for some mysterious reason, out of both of them. But the children did not unite them. Now he was dead, she knew how eternally he was apart from her, how eternally he had nothing more to do with her. She saw this episode of her life closed. They had denied each other in life. Now he had withdrawn. An anguish came over her. It was finished then: it had become hopeless between them long before he died. Yet he had been her husband. But how little!—. (2.130)
Somehow the trauma of Walter's death has made Elizabeth forget how babies are made? We jest, of course, but the point here is that Elizabeth takes what is often viewed as the ultimate act of physical connection in human existence and treats it like it's just kind of accidental or mysterious.
Quote #10
A terrible dread gripped her all the while: that he could be so heavy and utterly inert, unresponsive, apart. The horror of the distance between them was almost too much for her—it was so infinite a gap she must look across. (2.133)
Well, this is the big reason behind Elizabeth's feelings of alienation and despair: she has to confront the infinite—that is, death and all the unknowable things that it entails. Pretty scary stuff indeed.