The Rocking-Horse Winner: Quotes by Character

Paul

And he would slash the horse on the neck with the little whip he had asked Uncle Oscar for. He knew the horse could take him to where there was luck, if only he forced it. So he would mount again and start on his furious ride, hoping at last to get there.

This troubling description of Paul’s mania as he rides the rocking-horse in a fervent search for luck shows that his mother’s outlook has severely influenced Paul’s views. Unlike his mother, however, Paul feels that he can control his own life, and that such control requires considerable force and drive. His mother’s lack of love for her children and her obsession with wealth create an anxiety so overwhelming that Paul is compelled to physically attack it. His riding of the rocking-horse becomes a violent obsession, one that scares his sisters, disturbs the Nurse, and ultimately foreshadows his own disastrous circumstances. His impulses are ultimately born from a desire to win the love of his mother, who selfishly spends Paul’s winnings as quickly as he provides them and then bemoans her lack once again, leaving him as the sole family member with the will and power to provide. Though his energy is channeled into what under normal circumstances would be a childish play activity, this quote reveals the sinister form and strength of the compulsion that will eventually cause his death, as he sacrifices his childhood for his mother’s greedy needs.

‘Of course,’ said the boy, ‘I started it for mother. She said she had no luck, because father is unlucky, so I thought if I was lucky, it might stop whispering.’

Here Paul’s motivation for picking winners in the horse-races is bluntly revealed as an antidote for his parents’ rotten luck. Paul explains that he means to cease the incessant whispering of “There must be more money!” that pervades his household. When Paul speaks with his mother earlier in the story, she tells him that lucky people can always get more money, which leads Paul to conclude that he must become lucky to accrue money and win his mother's love. Paul’s mother seems distracted in the earlier conversation and unsure of what she is saying, yet the conversation has a strong and ultimately fatal effect on Paul.

Paul's Mother

There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages, yet she had no luck. She married for love, and the love turned to dust. She had bonny children, yet she felt they had been thrust upon her, and she could not love them.

The first lines of the story are similar to the start of a fable or fairy tale, but they reveal the folly of Paul's mother’s thinking and the root cause of the ultimate tragedy. A person who starts life with “all the advantages” is without a doubt lucky, so immediately readers see that Paul’s mother is not seeing her own life accurately. From the first lines of the story, we know that Paul’s mother does not feel responsible for her own happiness or unhappiness but instead expects happiness to be given to her in the form of material goods and wealth.

‘Besides, I think you care too much about these races. It's a bad sign. My family has been a gambling family, and you won't know till you grow up how much damage it has done. But it has done damage.’

Paul’s mother’s reading of her son’s obsession as “a bad sign” smacks of hypocrisy, since it was her own words that set him on this unhealthy path to begin with. With these lines, it is unclear whether Paul’s mother is speaking about health or money issues as a negative effect of gambling. From all we know about Paul’s mother up to this point, she is perhaps only warning Paul against losing too much money on the races, and not in fact looking after her son’s health. The fact that Paul’s mother’s family was a “gambling family” also sheds new light on Oscar’s interactions with Paul, since Oscar is her brother.

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