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The Rocking Horse Winner Analysis

Decent Essays

In The Rocking-Horse Winner (1933), a short story written by D. H. Lawrence, the reader finds out about “Paul’s” struggle and his family’s desire for luck. How the young boy would pick race winners by riding his toy horse. In Jack London’s To Build a Fire (1910) the reader engages in a horrific snowstorm plot the “man” soon finds himself trying to outwit. Destined, regardless of environmental factors he commands himself to journey across the frozen tundra towards his mining camp. “Although Paul and the Man’s stories take place in different settings and each show a distinct motive, they both share a similar fate” If I could use an example to describe both character’s journey from beginning to end I would use a triangle. Both characters are worlds apart from each other but are leveled by a similar struggle. This forms the first connecting points of a triangle, the base-line connecting two opposite points across. In order to compare both characters we have to begin with their struggle. The character “Paul,” had been battling the ongoing whispers that resonated throughout the house, as the passage states, “ And then the house whispers, like people laughing at you behind your back. It’s awful, that is! I thought if I was lucky-” (D. H. Lawrence 156). In order to stop these voices, which are the outcome of Paul’s mother’s desire to live beyond her means causing the family to always be short of money, young Paul must ride his rocking-horse to a point of exhaustion [mentally and

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