What is the tone of "The Rocking Horse Winner"?
The tone of "The Rocking-Horse Winner" is bleak and unhappy. It starts off, from the first paragraph, with a mother who believes she has no luck and finds she can't love her children. It moves from there to the children recognizing that their mother doesn't love them. Following that, we learn of the mother's perceived lack of money and a house that seems to cry out all the time for more money.
Although the family lives well and keeps up appearances, the house seems to say,
"There must be more money! There must be more money!"
The bleakness continues as the mother's son, Paul, becomes fixated on obtaining money for her by riding his rocking horse furiously hard until he can ascertain the winner of an upcoming horse race. Yet even giving his mother the winnings doesn't relieve the tension that permeates the household. No matter how much...
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Paul wins, it is never enough. The money also never earns him his mother's love. Finally, he dies to win her the huge Derby purse. This is a bleak ending to a bleak tale, as we can imagine that even that vast amount of money won't be enough to fill the hole in the mother's psyche.
Great question! Your answer to this story is going to be based on what you think the primary point of the story is. Do you think that this is primarily a ghost story of the supernatural which focuses on the spooky relationship between Paul and the rocking horse that enables Paul to eerily predict winning horses or is this primarily a moral tale which borders on the satirical as Lawrence drives home didactically his message about the dangers of materialism and how it can rip families apart and even lead to death?
Based on your answer to this question you can say that the tone of the story is either ominous and mystical, or satirical. If you go for the former you can focus on passages that describe how Paul describes the further you get into the story, particularly on his voice, his eyes and the rocking of the rocking horse. If satirical is your answer then you can talk about the greed of the mother and the irony at the end when she has gained her dream but lost her son in the process.
Who is the narrator of "The Rocking-Horse Winner" and what is their tone?
The author, D.H. Lawrence, uses an unnamed, third-person omniscient narrator. He makes an interesting shift, however, after the opening paragraphs, allowing a sense of his own point-of-view to permeate the narration with the introduction of Paul, the central character, while still technically maintaining the position of the third-person omniscient story-teller.
The story begins like a fairy-tale-like tone, with the introduction of "a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages, yet...had no luck". The characters and the situation are introduced in a detached manner, simply and straightforwardly; a tale is about to be told.
After the fourth paragraph, the narrator's tone takes on a slightly sinister aspect, with the insistent repetition of the unspoken phrase which haunts the house - "There must be more money! There must be more money!" The whispered mantra is heard everywhere, and by everybody, even the most innocent, - the "big doll...in her new pram", and "the foolish puppy...that took the place of the teddy bear".
With the introduction of Paul in the eighth paragraph, the author incorporates dialogue in the narrator's presentation of interaction between characters. At this point, although the narration remains in the third person, there is a more personal, involved tone to the story, with the author allowing his own message to be expressed.
In "The Rocking-Horse Winner," why is the tone tense and the mood mysterious?
Tone refers to the way author feels about the subject of the text, and I would argue that the author seems to disapprove of Paul's mother and her values. She is a "beautiful woman" who began life with many advantages, and though she married for love and made beautiful children, she is ungrateful for all she has because she wants more money. She feels a "hard little place" in her heart and she knows that she cannot love anyone else, and though she puts on a good show for others, her children are aware of her lack of love for them.
This certainly leads to a feeling of tension in the story; Paul, for example, wants to make his mother happy and to be lucky so that he can stop the whispering of the house. His mother tells him, "If you're lucky you have money," making him think that having money is the most important thing (rather than appreciating what other lucky things one has, like a loving husband and kind children). As a result of this lesson, Paul eventually dies trying to make money to soothe his mother. Lawrence's tone, then, is sympathetic to Paul and judgmental of Paul's mother, creating tension.
The mysterious mood is created, in part, by Paul's strange way of coming by information about which horse will win in the races. When he rides his rocking horse furiously, a name will come to him, and then he can bet on it. This is a mysterious process that adds to the mood. Paul's uncle gets involved, beginning to bet on horses at his nephew's suggestion, and he cannot understand it either. At one point, "the boy watched him with big blue eyes, that had a strange cold fire in them." The oxymoron—cold fire—is odd and off-putting, adding to the mood.