“Luck” is a key word in “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” an abstract quality valued by the mother and then by Paul and viewed as a panacea for all the family’s problems. Paul asks his mother early in the story, “Is luck money, mother?” after she claims that her husband has no luck. She replies that luck “causes you to have money”; therefore, in her eyes, “it’s better to be born lucky than rich. . . . You can always get more money.” The mother’s argument is that money can be spent and lost, but luck can always generate more money. Paul wonders how a person becomes lucky, but the mother has no answer. This conversation sets Paul on a relentless pursuit of “the secret to ‘luck.’ ” The boy conceives of luck as something he can work for, not something he is simply given; this is why he repeats the ritual of riding on his rocking horse, entering a strange trance, and eventually imagining the name of the winning horse as a result of his ride and his concentration. Bassett, on the other hand, sees Paul’s luck as being sent “from heaven.”

Paul pursues luck in an attempt to win money to give to his mother and to silence the house’s whisperings that it needs more money. However, after he achieves success in predicting horse races and his mother receives some of the money, she spends it all right away on frivolities, and the house starts to scream for more. The pressure Paul feels after this unexpected turn of events causes him to lose his touch: “The Grand National had come and gone by and he had not ‘known’ ” the winner. Paul turns again to his rocking horse, his “secret within a secret,” and gets to work. He rides the horse so vigorously and for so long that he becomes weak and eventually develops a “brain sickness” that kills him. On his deathbed, Paul learns that his last named winner, Malabar, did indeed take the race, and Paul made eighty thousand pounds. His luck did generate a great sum of money, but it comes at the cost of the boy’s life.