The Rocking-Horse Winner

The Rocking-Horse Winner is a great story that carries multiple themes despite its short text. It revolves around a young boy name Paul who is constantly trying to gain and keep his mother’s love and affection.

Though Paul’s mother is blessed with a great many things, she does not live a luxurious life and is never thankful for all the good things she does possess. The mother blames the lack of money on Paul’s father who she feels has no luck. The family is often preoccupied with efforts of finding more money and because of that the children, especially the sensitive Paul starts to hear the house whisper, “There must be more money”.

Paul longs to silence the house from the whispers and takes it upon himself to find more money. Wanting himself to be lucky, Paul rides on his big rocking-horse, charging madly looking for luck. During his hypnotic rides on the rocking-horse Paul comes to know the names of horses that would win at the race track. After winning a fair sum of money which he arranged to pass on to his mother anonymously, the whispers in the house continues on and in fact becomes worst than before. This pushes Paul to continue his frantic and obsessive quest to find more money which in the end causes his death.

Within this quick read, The Rocking-Horse Winner amazingly carries a variety of important themes; obsessions with materialistic things can make one forget their responsibility as a parent and greed can make one heartless.

Good read. By the way, after I finished reading The Rocking-Horse Winner only did I realized that I’ve read this story before. LOL! Thank God for blogging, now I have a record of the things I've read!

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