The Rocking Horse-Horse Winner Illness

Between the works How to Read Literature like a Professor and The Rocking-Horse Winner, a similarity that may be seen is in the mysterious ‘illness’ the young boy Paul develops in comparison to Chapter 23 Professor Foster’s guide about illnesses rarely being the sickness actually being described. Throughout The Rocking Horse-Winner, the main character Paul is pressured by a special ‘gift’ that allows him to be everything his mother ever wanted- lucky- yet it ultimately results in him obtaining an illness that takes his life. Throughout the story, Lawrence uses this gift and turns it into an illness in order to develop a story with power, greed, and ‘luck’ changing people, and creating a situation beyond what their desires are worth.
At the

However, without noticing his uncles expressive warnings of “Paul, old man” here and there, Paul continues betting on horses, the audience sees the shift in the young boy who had “those big, hot, blue eyes” to one who made his uncle “stir and laugh uneasily” due to his advanced mind (Lawrence 4). Ever heard of the expression ‘one’s eyes tell what’s on a person’s mind?’ In this case, Paul’s eyes show the madness that was beginning to engulf him, giving him a warning that an uncontrollable power was beginning to take over. As Paul’s family tries to exploit its power, the worse Paul becomes, for “his big blue eyes [blazed] with a sort of madness” (Lawrence 7), working him to his, well, rather unfortunate death. What they did not see is that luck has only become one thing: an illness that “says whatever its maker wants it to say” (Foster 231); Lawrence is trying to convey is that this ‘luck’ the family yearns for had become greed that was more important than loving their own son/ nephew for who he was before- a child of youth and innocence. By the end of the piece, Paul had contracted a critical illness that made his eyes, once full of life, turn to ‘blue stones,’ or a lifeless boy that had done everything in his power to make his family proud of him being lucky, yet instead of delivering this by a letter, it came with his