“The Rocking-Horse Winner” by D.H. Lawrence and “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson are two extravagant literary works from the America history. This paper is a comparison and contrast of these two suspenseful and dynamic short stories. These short stories are different to each other in terms of their tone and style, but share tragic ironies. Both of them keeps the reader in the dark throughout the short story, but both of them have powerful emotional endings. “The Lottery” is a tale about an annual tradition in a small village where the whole village comes together, and one of them wins the lottery. It builds an outline of the village people coming together for a joyous occasions to enjoy with each other. At the culmination of the story, the lottery turns out to be a bad thing and becomes the cause of someone’s death. “The Rocking-Horse Winner” is a story based on the family inheritance tradition and a generational curse that seems good but it turns out to be bad. This story is in integration of fantasy tale based on unrealistic events, about a boy and his ability to predict horse races on the basis his childhood rocking horse.
On the outlook, a reader cannot recognize any major similarities between both these stories. With a closer reading, it can be understood that there is a similarity between these both stories on the basis of love, fear and symbolism. In both stories, the behaviour of both characters brings them to reach their own tragedies. In this fictional essay, the relation between two characters will be made to every ordinary person today and how today society is represented by the several themes in these stories. The paper will explore how one character’s defiance and self-centered nature leads to her death while the other character treats herself as “unlucky” and her greed and wish to be wealthy contributes to the demise of her son.
Abstract
This paper will analyze the ways in which the two stories The Lottery and The Rocking Horse Winner are different to each other. The first section will analyze the similarities and differences between these two stories in terms of tone, irony and style, from a fictional point of view. The second section of this paper will analyze the styles in these two stories and similarities between these two stories. The Following section will analyze the atmosphere in these stories. The final part of the paper will discuss the use of symbols in both these stories.
The Lottery vs. The Rocking-Horse Winner
Comparison and Contrast
The style in both these stories plays well into a typical short story structure, with many variants. ‘The Lottery’ spends a large amount of time on exposition, while it does not flesh out the particular characters, establishing that in their town the event of a crisis is ordinary for them and evidently of little consequence. The exposition of ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ is rather different as it is short and focuses on a character, which is not fully crucial or central to the story.
Another thing that can be said about the character’s tone in ‘the lottery’ is that all characters are positively amoral, which are cheerful, but they lack the response and emotion expected in a crisis. ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ has a much darker and a negative immoral atmosphere where the characters have a clear lack of emotional interest with each other and they have no issue of expressing it. Hester is the driving force of vanity in the story, she possesses everything she requires still she cannot be satiated.
Both these stories show the dangers of conformity. In "The Rocking-Horse Winner," Tessie feels that she felt she must cover up some fault, and despite no one forces her to prove her worth, she has a nebulous need to do so (Lawrence). She expects the "discreet servants" to be part of the upper class, and her son understands his mother's needs, sacrifice his life. The same conformity is also evident in "The Lottery" where the members of a town push each other for going along with the lottery. Wagner, the old man, calls the towns which give up lottery fools and proposes that the rain might not come for them. Clearly, both these stories have huge societal pressure in the conformity.
The characters of Hester from Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and that of Tessie from D. H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner” are stories challenges faced by of two mothers in their lives. The stories are contrasted as these characters differ as Hester shows better mothering instincts over Tessie, who cares more about her own self. Their first impressions are also a contrast and mislead the readers as Hester is shown as uncaring and cold women, whereas Tessie is shown as light hearted and warm. Throughout the story, Hester grows into the role of the mother, whereas Tessie’ mothering instincts are not apparent by the end of the story. Finally, Hester, as a mother handles crisis in her life in a better way than Tessie.
In “The Rocking-Horse Winner”, a little boy by the name of Paul is the protagonist. He is an exuberant and passionate little boy. Paul gambles in horse racing to help his family make money and help them survive. Paul has the power to know which horse would win; he rides his old rocking-horse and gets a feeling while riding about a certain horse’s win. While in “The Lottery”, the main character is of Tessie, like Paul, she is also gambling, but she isn’t gambling by her choice and not for profit. Along with the people in her village, Tessie is gambling with her life. Tessie gets excited every year about the lottery, except when her family gets drawn, she starts protesting against the unfair lottery.
In “The Rocking Horse Winner”, the author D.H Lawrence mentions his omniscient point of view through a vivid imagery and sardonic tone to correspond the main theme that is money’s ability to corrupt and distort the humanity. He has used symbols, such as the house and the rocking horse, too, build the theme and create an allegory of greed, luck and materialism. In "The Lottery", by author Shirley Jackson the lottery and the black box are symbols. The lottery symbolizes the cruel traditions in our society, carried out daily without people knowing the reason behind it. The black box represents the illogical villagers’ loyalty and tradition of the lottery to it.
Conclusion
However, where “The Rocking-Horse Winner” is a story about love, "The Lottery" is about the lack of love. Paul adores his mother so much that he risks his life to help her when she is desperate. But in "The Lottery", other people in town are unwilling to give up cruel joy of stoning someone to death. The lack of compassion in the story for another human is implausible, and when someone passes a stone into the lands of little Davy, it is clear that the next generation is being taught the same lack of compassion. This display of love and compassion is in sharp contrast to the character of Paul, who sacrifices his life to make his Hester (his mother) happier.
Reference List
Lawrence, D. H. (1926). The Rocking-Horse Winner. Retrieved May 31, 2014, from http://koppen.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/3/4/13349759/the-rocking-horse-winner.pdf
Jackson, S. (1982). The lottery: And other stories. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
