Student Question
What literary devices are used in the following quote from “The Rocking-Horse Winner”?
"Yet nobody ever said it aloud. The whisper was everywhere, and therefore no one spoke it. Just as no one ever says: ‘We are breathing!’ in spite of the fact that breath is coming and going all the time."
Quick answer:
The quote from "The Rocking-Horse Winner" uses literary devices such as personification, synecdoche, and hyperbole. The house is personified, whispering a need for money. The whisper serves as synecdoche, representing the family's pervasive tension and dissatisfaction. Hyperbole emphasizes the omnipresent tension, compared to the constant act of breathing. The family's dysfunction, driven by the mother's emotional void, is unconsciously accepted as normal, highlighting the unspoken yet critical nature of their financial obsession.
This quote from the short story “The Rocking-Horse Winner” contains various literary devices, including personification, synecdoche, and hyperbole.
First, the characters’ house is personified by its constant whispering. Seemingly alive and supernatural, the claustrophobic dwelling eerily repeats the need for more money; it “came to be filled with the unspoken words.” No single person actually states that the family needs more money; nonetheless, the children hear a disembodied voice that repeats,
There must be more money! There must be more money!
Second, the whisper itself is an example of synecdoche. As part of a larger whole, the whisper is merely a small sign of the overall, ubiquitous tension felt by the family occupying the house. Paul and his siblings hear a whisper that represents their mother’s greedy dissatisfaction with her “unlucky” husband and their lifestyle. Her resentment builds up pressure and increases Paul’s anxiety over the...
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family’s limited finances. The whisper is part of “secret words all over the house.”
Third, this quote uses hyperbole to emphasize the increasing, eventually unbearable tension. The pervasive whisper is “everywhere” and inescapable. Unspoken discomfort permeates the household. Word choice like “nobody” and the repeated “no one” stresses that no character dares admits the problem out loud. Yet the tension is omnipresent; it’s as obvious and incessant as the act of breathing “all the time.” Breath itself is personified as an active agent unceasingly “coming and going.”
What critical lens is used in the quote from "The Rocking-Horse Winner"?
"Yet nobody ever said it aloud. The whisper was everywhere, and therefore no one spoke it. Just as no one ever says: 'We are breathing!' in spite of the fact that breath is coming and going all the time."
Usually, a critical lens comes from outside a work of literature and is the way an outside reader understands the meaning of a story. It is interesting in this case to apply it to the story's narrator, who is commenting on the family in this passage. The narrator is both inside the story, part of its words, and yet outside in this instance, as this particular narrator is omniscient and commenting from "above."
This critical lens is psychoanalytic. The narrator's voice is analyzing the unconscious and dysfunctional dynamics that control this family. As is often the case in families, a dominant family member with a problem can infect the whole family. In this case, it is the mother, whose incapacity to love manifests or expresses itself in a need for more and more money as a desperate means to fill her inner emptiness.
Because of the mother's problem, perhaps the result of an early trauma that shut her down emotionally, the whole family feels her sense of lack. The quote itself says,
Yet nobody ever said it aloud. The whisper was everywhere, and therefore no one spoke it.
The "it" referred to is that "there must be more money!" This neediness, this insatiable desire for more than can never be fulfilled, comes, as we noted above, from the mother's damaged psyche. It seems natural to the family, because it has always been a part of their lives, so nobody speaks of it. This refers to another psychological truth of dysfunctional family dynamics: abnormal ways of living and relating can come to seem normative, even if uncomfortable, to children who have never known anything else.
What is the thesis in this quote from "The Rocking-Horse Winner"?
Yet nobody ever said it aloud. The whisper was everywhere, and therefore no one spoke it. Just as no one ever says: "We are breathing!" in spite of the fact that breath is coming and going all the time.
The thesis of these lines from “The Rocking-Horse Winner” is that the most important things in life are often not explicitly stated. The “whisper” referred to is the sentence “There must be more money!” that dominates the family featured in D. H. Lawrence’s story. For this family, money is as essential as oxygen. The paradox is that because it is so crucial, the family members rarely speak out loud about money.
The quoted lines, which come near the beginning, directly follow several paragraphs in which the narrator establishes the parents’ feeling that they need more money. The mother, in particular, does not distinguish between what she wants and what the family needs. The sensation is so strong and pervasive that the house itself becomes “haunted” by the feeling. The whispers come from the material objects that are lavished on the children, such as fancy toys like the rocking horse, and these toys are presented as capable of hearing the phrase as well.
This elaborate description establishes that the children also come to believe in this necessity, and this belief leads to Paul’s desperate attempts to win money.
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