"The Rocking-Horse Winner" is narrated by a third-person omniscient narrator to offer insight into the minds of all of the characters in the story, allowing readers to explore the internal motivations for certain behaviors that don't seem logical but nevertheless play out again and again. In the beginning of the story, we only know the characters through their roles within the family: there is a mother with one son and two daughters. The mother's proper name is mentioned only once, in the last lines of the story, and the father remains unnamed throughout. The parents are largely absent from the story just as they are largely absent from Paul's life. While the narrator lets us into Paul’s mother’s mind, his father's is a mystery. In the parents' absence, characters like Uncle Oscar and Basset, who will do whatever Paul asks them to do as long as they profit, are able to get close to the boy and take advantage of his gifts without helping him learn healthier ways to escape his anxiety, all of which the narrator relates as if from a distance right up to the conclusion. Though the narrator begins the story as if it were a fairy tale, thereby lending events a certain inevitability, there’s no happy ending to be found.