The Rocking-Horse Winner- D.H. Lawrence

Abstract: In the story, the mother says she is very unlucky and her husband is also unlucky. Her sons then tells her how he is lucky. He and his siblings always hear voices in their house that say "There must be more money!" Paul, her son, then starts betting on horse races with the help of Basset their gardener. He makes a lot of money doing this, and his uncle also knows about his betting. Paul is able to do this a lot and win quite a bit of money. He wants to give all of it to his mother. He gives her 5000 pounds. He was going to give her 1000 a year for 5 years, but she wanted it all. He then started losing all the races he was betting. One night he was really upset that he couldn't 'know' the right one. He then started rocking on his rocking horse very crazily which he had done numerous times leading him to know. His mom then had a gut feeling that something was wrong, so she came home early from a party. When she came home, she found him rocking. He then shouted the horses name that he thought would when the Derby. For the next days, he was very sick and dying. He then found out that the horse he chose won the race. He now had 80,000 pounds to give to his mother. He then said how he was lucky. He died later that night.


Response: I think the mom is kind of annoying in how she thinks she's unlucky just cause she is poor. She should just deal with her problems. It's also horrible how she doesn't really care for her children that much. Why did she have a sudden change of heart at the end? Was she finally happy with the money she had? She could have finally felt satisfied with her money and felt like she could then love her children. I think that Paul's extreme desire for luck was because he wanted to be loved by his mother who did not really love his father because he was unlucky. Also, the 'voices' that they always heard saying "There must be more money!" were maybe just a figment of their imaginations. Instead that saying and feeling they 'heard' because that was how their mother acted, always acting like what she had was not good enough. Why did Paul die though? Did he die from the stress of always wanting to pick the correct winner? Did Paul really get the winner's name from a higher power? There is really no explanation to why he was able to pick the winner but other times he was not. Maybe it was just luck that he was able to pick the winner and the rocking horse had nothing to do with it. It's kind of sick that all the stress and turmoil he spent trying to get a lot of money and be 'lucky' may of caused him to eventually die. Paul's mother did not have her priorities straight. She valued material things over her relationships especially with her children. It is also odd how she thought luck caused you to have money rather than hard-work. She just wanted favors and did not really want to work-hard in order to get what she wanted.