The Rocking-Horse Winner and The Lottery by Lawrence and Jackson - Essay Example

A lottery is considered as one of the fastest ways of becoming wealthy. People who win the lottery are considered ‘lucky’ as they get the money without working hard for it or without working for it. However, with the chance of winning a huge amount of money luckily, the lottery also brings a danger of making people lose their sanity by getting obsessed with winning more of it.

The desire of winning keeps on increasing no matter how much money they win. Hence, a lottery is one such ‘lucky’ chance that brings with it an underlying evil spell that people fail to see and fall victim to its deathly effects.  The Theme Authors D.H. Lawrence and Shirley Jackson have explored the nature of the lottery in an excellent way in their short stories ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner and ‘The Lottery’ respectively. The theme of their stories is the lottery.

However, the prize that is won by the characters in the stories differs. Their stories introduce the readers to two different faces of the lottery and how it affects human beings negatively. The Mystery Called Luck In the story ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner, D.H.Lawrence has described the human tendency to believe in a thing called ‘luck’ without knowing what it really is. He has shown how human beings lose peace of mind in an attempt to have ‘luck’. Through a character called Paul, he has explained that people have a tendency to take the desire ‘luck’ without understanding what it is.

In the story, a child called Paul finds people talking about his father not being ‘lucky’ and this makes him think about ‘luck’ constantly. Finally, when he asks his mother what ‘luck’ is, she is not able to give a satisfactory explanation. The surprising thing is, Paul’s mother blames her husband for being unlucky and tells Paul that she has become unlucky after marrying him. Through the dialogue between Paul and his mother regarding luck, the author has put across the message that when people are not able to understand a particular situation, they try to explain that situation through luck.

  The atmosphere of sadness and depression lurks in their house and Paul becomes obsessed with the idea of becoming lucky.