Completeness as a Loss

There is a passage in the chapter Man to Man that we did not discuss in class yesterday, but which I thought was extremely interesting and an important theme to the novel.
      "Birkin was looking a Gerald all the time.  He seemed now to see, not the physical, animal man, which he usually saw in Gerald, and which usually he liked so much, but the man himself, complete, and as if fated, doomed, limited. This strange sense of fatality in Gerald, as if he were limited to one form of existence, one knowledge, one activity, a sort of fatal halfness, which to himself seemed wholeness, always overcame Birkin after their moments of passionate approach, and filled him with a sort of contempt, or boredom. It was the insistence on the limitation which so bored Birkin in Gerald. Gerald could never fly away from himself, in realindifferent gaiety."
The idea of being trapped or confined to one state of being is a concern that defines Birkin, and in many ways fuels how he interacts with other characters. His dislike of Hermione for instance, is in part fueled by her refusal to gain knowledge that, while she claims "takes away from experience," Birkin views as allowing one to gain the ability to transcend oneself and truly understand other forms of existence. The central conflict in his relationship with Ursula is his refusal to "love" her as she wants to be love, because he views that love as confining. He wants the relationship to be beyond love with "a final me which is stark and impersonal and beyond responsibility." He can't even be satisfied with one type of love, but rather needs both the love of a woman and a man. He loves the idea of the freedom of death even saying that there is "nothing better." Birkin's infatuation with mortality has led him to believe that life and living confine him. It seems, at least so far, that nothing Birkin does in the novel is final. No decision or action taken by him moves in a forward direction. That is, anything Birkin says or does will not limit him to one state of being. Even his most progressive act in the novel, proposing to Ursula, ends without much of a fight or any real sense of passion. He like, like Gudrun, bases his life in objectivity. Unlike Gudrun, whose objectivity is focused on her external environment however, Birkin is objective towards the self. He hates mankind for its egocentricity, and it is because his detachment of his own ego, that I do not believe he will be able to have love.