The Rocking-Horse Winner

577 Words3 Pages
The style and level of clarity and author chooses to depict a theme or moral can completely reverse what the reader elicits from the story as a whole. A piece of writing can portray numerous underlying messages, but depending on how well the writer paints this image, the comprehension can dramatically vary. In the short story, The Rocking-Horse Winner, the author D.H. Lawrence uses various literary devices to spin an interesting yarn about an “unlucky” family that becomes engulfed with a greed for wealth while giving innuendo to a valuable sense of morality. The critical article, The Rocking-Horse Winner: A Modern Myth, written by Donald Junkins makes an obvious point about the issue of responsibility of “the intolerable burden of attempting to solve the mother’s ‘problem,’ which is…the lack of money in the household” Junkins 1. Junkins goes on to state that the story “dramatizes modern man’s unsuccessful attempt to act out and emerge from his oedipal conflict with the woman-mother” Junkins 1. In a way, “the story is couched in the symbols of ancient myths. The mother…the poor, unsatisfied fairy princess who yearns for happiness… [and] Paul is the gallent knight on horseback who rides to her rescue.” Junkins 1. The boy, Paul, “literally sacrifices himself” in effort to cure his mother’s despair, which is ultimately impossible and as we find out at the end of the story, “death is his only way out of his dilemma…”Junkins 1. Even the opening lines of the writing, “There was a woman who was beautiful…yet she had no luck” suggests the “fable-like quality” and yet the story takes place “in the atmosphere of the modern world” Lawrence 290 & Junkins 2. In a similar article, Overview of The Rocking-Horse Winner, by Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton, indicates the theme that “every success brings a new and greater trial.” She also goes on to indicate that the mother who
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