After Clifford is severely injured in World War I, he is paralyzed from the waist down and uses a wheelchair to move around. The wheelchair symbolizes how the modern world is growing increasingly reliant on technology and machinery; it also symbolizes how the upper classes, who traditionally held the most power, are becoming increasingly fragile and powerless.

The narrative and various characters repeatedly comment on how the modern world is decaying because humanity has become dependent on machinery, cut off from the rhythms of the natural world. Industrialization and technological progress left human beings increasingly alienated; in the aftermath of the war, people had also witnessed how technology, such as machine guns and poison gas, could be harnessed to cause atrocities. Clifford’s wheelchair is a machine that reflects the suffering that machines can cause, and the cyclical nature of technology; because he was hurt by machines during war time, he is now dependent on machines.

Since Clifford is an aristocrat, his use of a wheelchair reflects the decline of the upper classes. In a key scene, Clifford is forced to rely on Mellors, a working-class man, to push the chair up a hill. The scene symbolically reveals how the upper classes only achieve power and wealth because of the physical labor of the working classes.