In the short story "The Rocking-Horse Winner," D.H. Lawrence presents an
upper class family that was destroyed by greed because they always felt like no matter how much money they had, they always needed more. Neither the mother nor the father showed his or her love for the children and they were both greedy. Their greed consumed and corrupted their innocent children which ended in tragedy and death. This story's main theme is that greed destroys all in its path, and sometimes gets in the way of the truth and takes the place of love.
In the story the mother and father are loveless and greedy. Greed consumes the
mother's thoughts and distorts her outlook on life. She thinks that money is much more
important than anything else, including her children, and no matter how much money she
acquires she can never be happy. Of her three children, Paul was the one who was driven
by his mother's greed. He developed a ridiculous obsession to try and win his mother's
love. He begins riding his wooden rocking horse to find the winner of the horse races.
He wins money by betting on his winning horse and he becomes obsessed. His riding
In many ways, money turns to evil and distorts the way of life for greedy people.
At the beginning of the story Paul would
"sit on his big rocking horse, charging madly into space..." later it says, "He knew
the horse could take him to where there was luck, if only he forced it" (998).
This shows how Paul's outlook on luck is distorted due to his mothers reasoning. He
becomes obsessed with riding his rocking horse to go where there is luck which all boils
down to money, and in the end Paul dies because of his riding the horse.
Paul's quest for winning money for his mother got so bad, that one dark night, two
nights before the Derby, a big race, his mother was out at a party and he was put to bed.
His anxiety about the winner kept him from sleeping
...