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I don't have the time to read the whole essay at the moment, so I'm just going by the passages you quoted.
The first thing that came to my mind is, that something must be wrong with Donaldson's idea applied to LotR, since Frodo doesn't ever directly struggle with Sauron at all. If at all, the Ring has to be Frodo's shadow (though of course one could make the argument that Sauron and his Ring aren't really separate characters). The Ring, however, definitely is both, an external and an internal force, and thus fits the job description very well. The Ring externalises certain struggles that otherwise take place inside a character. It is (among other things) the permanent availability of an easy way out, whether the character is faced with dangers (Black Riders), or the decision between a hard and an easy way (destroy or use Ring to destroy Sauron), and an ever-increasing mental and physical weight that wants to keep the character from fulfilling his duty.
Then again, it can't really be applied to the whole book. The "philosophy" behind using the ring or not to destroy Sauron (and thus becoming a Dark Lord themselves or not) is an important part of the book and defines many characters to a large degree. However, this struggle does not actually form the whole of the novel. Book 3, for example, is barely concerned with the Ring's effects. Are the parts that tell us about the struggles of Aragorn, Gandalf, Merry and Pippin, Théoden, and Denethor just fancy, but negligible, accessories? This makes me think: Do we really need an explicit second character that the first character can struggle with in order to have an externalised struggle? Maybe Donaldson's idea is valid, but too narrow the way he formulates it.
One thing that Donaldson certainly got wrong is that he says "Frodo spends the novel in the process of becoming Sauron". To the contrary, he spends the novel (successfully) resisting becoming Sauron, and only giving in in the crucial end. Right before entering Sammath Naur, he's clearly still himself. This has me thinking whether there are main characters in Tolkien's works who do struggle between good and evil over a longer course of time and who do become evil (or good again) gradually. Nobody from the LotR, but from the Silm Túrin or Maedhros and Maglor come to mind.
Am I mistaken, or does Donaldson's idea have one interesting consequence:
We've all heard people criticise LotR for its supposed lack of character depth. This looks a lot different in the light of this idea, since the character development is not confined to being inside the characters anymore.
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