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The Rocking-Horse Winner And The Lottery By D. H. Lawrence

882 Words4 Pages

Shirley Jackson’s story, “The Lottery,” was written in 1948. It is about a town that gets together to play a game and at the end someone dies. D.H. Lawrence’s story, “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” was written in 1993. Lawrence's story is about a boy who wants to make his mother happy by doing what he can to please her, but she has such a huge obsession with money that the boy can not do anything to make her mother proud. In both “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” by D. H. Lawrence, and “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson, the authors use symbolism and themes to convince their audiences. D.H. Lawrence uses many themes in her short story such as an obsession for money, wanting love, gaining luck, and death. The two stories also use symbolism to help the reader better comprehend the theme of the story. Although, the themes of the stories have some differences. “The Rocking-Horse Winner” is about love and ”The Lottery” is on the lack of love, though, in comparison, the two stories also focused on greed, cruelty, and wealth. …show more content…

H. Lawrence, both involve greed. In Shirley Jackson’s short story, every year a lottery is held to randomly select one townsperson to be killed. The people do these incredibly greedy, evil, and cruel things just to keep a tradition. The three primary symbols that Shirley uses in the story are the setting, black box, and the actual characters’ names. The lottery caused the people to be greedy, which made them “take their chance” of winning or losing as well as some saying that “it wasn't fair” that they lost (Jackson 1). The theme of “The Rocking-Horse Winner” is also greed. The mother is unsatisfied inside and looks outside herself for happiness. Because she does not love herself, she is unable to love her family and even appreciate the gifts that she has been

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Imagine the love of your life, a random old man, and the whole town is responsible for your death. That is exactly what occurred with the main protagonist in the novel Lottery. The Lottery is a short novel, written by Shirley Jackson published on June 26, 1948. The story paints a fictional town with an annual ritual known as the lottery. The lottery requests the head of the household to draw slips.

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The Lottery and the Rocking-Horse Winner,” both are fictional; each of the stories has their own unhappiness and tragedy at the end. At the point when a chance is considered as a power that causes great or awful things to happen society view it as good fortune. “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, focuses on how custom shapes the villagers truth. Even after the older generation in town including Old Man Warner, Mr. Summers, and Mr. Graves, neglect the basic cause of tradition.

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These two stories have different tones in the beginning but by the end they are both dark and sad. In the beginning of the story of “Rocking-Horse Winner”, the reader could tell the tone by the mother not being in a happy joyful mood about their living situation. Unlike the story, “The Lottery” where the audience would have thought that the story would stay happy, because of how the author describes the beginning of the story. The tone in “The Rocking-Horse Winner” did correspond with the action occurring in the story because the feeling that the mother gives off as well as the house makes the son want to be lucky for his mother so she would not be that way anymore. This forces him to make sure he rocks on his little rocking horse until he is sure of the winner in the next horse race to win money until that anxiety kills him (Lawrence, 1933, p. 175).

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In 1948, when the New Yorker published Shirley Jacksons piece, “The Lottery,” it sparked outrage among readers, but could arguably be known as one of her most famous pieces of writing. In this short story, Shirley Jackson used literally elements such as imagery, diction, and symbolism to foreshadow the negative and harsh ending of the story; the harsh ending that sparked such outrage by society in the 1940’s. One of the main ways Jackson foreshadows the ending and true meaning of her short story, “The Lottery,” is through symbolism. Jackson uses the color black throughout the story.

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The short story “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson is about a small town that conducts an annual lottery. The entire town gathers to participate in the sacrificial stoning of the so-called winner. Jackson’s aim for this story was to show the general evil of human nature and the unnecessary violence in the world. Jackson uses the third person point of view and a lot of characters to help convey the purpose of the story by distancing the reader from the characters. This shocks the reader at the ending and allows them to view the story from an outside perspective and see the reality of the situation.

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“The Lottery”, by Shirley Jackson is a very suspenseful, yet very shocking short story. This story is set in a small village, on a hot summers day in June. Flowers are blooming, and the towns people are gathering for the lottery, which is a tradition the town does every year. As the reader reads the first paragraph they think this is a happy story. The title also says, “The Lottery” which is a word often used for winning something or receiving a prize.

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Yet Jackson wrote "The Lottery" in 1948—before gang violence, teen suicides, the threat of nuclear war, and handgun crimes reached epidemic proportions. Was Jackson looking into the future of the American society?"(Hicks). The story of the lottery truly could be foreshadowing of the future and how we nowadays are. We don’t see the importance of each other's life, no matter if it's one person or a hundred. We would sacrifice each other to fill our own foolish greed.

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Money and the pursuit thereof has often proven itself to be disastrous to the balance of society and the interworking of the human mind. In The Rocking-Horse Winner, by author D.H. Lawrence, readers begin to see the psychological effects of the never ending pursuit of riches. The main character, Paul, learns the devastating consequences of greed at a young age, when he discovers that he has special talent for picking the winning race horses. Having grown up in a family that craves a lavish lifestyle that they can not afford, the boy sees this as an opportunity to provide for his mother and the rest of his family. Nevertheless, the situation escalates into an obsession that he will never recover from.

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