Lessons Learned (Three messages from The Rocking Horse Winner) There’s always those types of stories that will just take you by storm, and leave you in bewilderment afterwards. The most recent example of that would be the short story, The Rocking Horse Winner. Writer Spence Lawe sums this story up the best with, “An Oedipal drama seasoned with a dash of social commentary and a pinch of the supernatural” (Lawe). Paul is a young boy that uses his supernatural gift of using his rocking horse to find out winners of a derby, to his advantage. He began betting on these races and gaining lots of money, all in an act to prove he is lucky to his mother. The exhaustion of all this proved that his blessing was nothing more than a curse, when he died after making his final prediction. In D.H. Lawrence’s The Rocking Horse Winner, there were three impactful messages conveyed. First of all, the message that greed will ruin your life, was a strong one. Consistently throughout the story, the house will whisper, “There must be more money” (pg. 1248). Those were the words that would drive this family insane, that idea summed up the entire family’s thought process. A writer by the name of Patrick Gillespie tells the truth of greed in these …show more content…
Not only was there greed in the story, but the poor family was trying to use money to constitute for a lack of love. Paul was hoping to provide his mother with more and more money so that she’ll provide him with love in return, but that was not the case. For example, when Paul gave his mother 5,000 pounds for birthday money, she didn’t even smile. “As his mother read it, her face hardened and became more expressionless” (pg. 1256). A writer by the name of Aaron Ben-Zeev, illustrates this idea in his article when he writes, “Love is depicted as something sacred that money cannot buy, just as money cannot buy God”