Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and DH Lawrence's "The Rocking-Horse Winner," the desire of human beings to gain control over their existence with the use of rituals and 'magic' is in evidence.
Use of ritual and superstition in "The Lottery and "The Rocking Horse Winner"

In one story, magic is real, in the other it is not II. "The Lottery"

Plot of sacrifice

Sacrifice highly ritualized

Not performing the magic is seen as barbaric, ironically

"The Rocking-Horse Winner"

Plot of Paul's prediction of horse racing winners

Materialism of parents destroys child

The 'magic' of the rocking horse wins money but simply makes the family more extravagant

Conclusion

oth stories highlight the inefficient, destructive nature of rituals and superstitions

. Stories collectively suggest that whether magic and rituals are real or false, they are destructive.

Compare and contrast: "The Lottery" versus "The Rocking-Horse Winner"

Superstition and folk beliefs are a common theme of many short stories. In both Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and DH Lawrence's…...

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Bibliography

Jackson, Shirley. "The Lottery," 1948. 17 May 2014.

"http://sites.middlebury.edu/individualandthesociety/files/2010/09/jackson_lottery.pdf

Lawrence, DH "The Rocking-Horse Winner," 17 May 2014,

 http://www.dowse.com/fiction/Lawrence.html

Poetry, and Drama because I do not have all the information I needed to do so. I also did not have the page annotations for the numbering of the book so I numbered the pages in the parenthetical citations with the number of the page in the story itself. You will need to change the page numbers if you wish them to correspond with the text you were supposed to use. Also your works cited page is annotated with the abstract for the articles so therefore you can cut and paste each entry into a card format. All the articles are available online at EBSCO Academic Search Elite, to access this if you need copies go to the reference desk at any library public or school and they will tell you how to use EBSCO if you don't already know how. Almost every library carries it as one of…...

Outline I. The dangers of conformity is the main theme of both D.H. Lawrence’s short story “The Rocking-Horse Winner” and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.”
A. Although these stories were written in different times and places and describe different characters and events, they converge on the main theme of conformity to irrelevant or harmful social norms.
B. Both Lawrence and Jackson use literary devices like symbolism, irony, and characterization to convey the theme of conformity.
II. Characterization is central to both of these short stories, helping to show how weakness and lack of self-awareness lead to blind conformity, causing suffering and even death.
A. The mother in “The Rocking Horse Winner” is like Bill Hutchinson in “The Lottery,” even though the latter could have prevented his wife’s death.
B. Tessie and Paul are both sacrificial lambs, although Tessie does realize the stupidity of the social rules governing the community.
III. The authors use irony to anchor the theme,…...

Destructors, by Graham Greene and "The Rocking-Horse inner," by DH Lawrence. Specifically, it will compare and contrast the two stories. Greed has always been a powerful motivator, and greed is one of the main themes in these two works that seem quite similar at first glance. However, a closer reading brings out the dissimilarities in these works, but ultimately points to greed as a powerful destructive force in our lives, and that society reveres money and possessions above all else.
Greed in Two Similar orks

Initially, these two short stories seem quite similar. They are both set in Great Britain, and they both have young boys as their main characters. At first glance, they seem as if they might be stories about growing up in different worlds than we are used to, but underlying this first look are some dark and disturbing themes about how greed can destroy, and how destruction…...

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Works Cited

Greene, Graham. 21 Stories. New York: Viking Press, 1962.

Lawrence, DH "The Rocking-Horse Winner." Dowse.com. 2001. 20 March 2003.  http://www.dowse.com/fiction/Lawrence.html

Winner Not a Winner?
In the short story "The Rocking Horse Winner" by DH Lawrence, the writer creates a spooky fantasy in which three major themes, luck, money, and love combine to form a bizarre and deadly unity. The boy Paul, intuitively feeling the lack of love in his family, becomes the embodiment of his parents obsessions with money. Riding his toy rocking horse he receives supernatural messages that allow him to pick winners in real horse races. He believes that he thus renews his family's luck, by winning money which he equates on an unconscious level with love. Lawrence uses the unified themes of luck, money and love to create a symbolic representation of life that is not truly lived, but in which concepts of luck, money and love are perverted into an imitation of life, the falseness of which kills the boy Paul.

This is a story about the…...

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Bibliography

Beauchamp, Gorman. "Lawrence's The Rocking-Horse Winner." Explicator 31.5 (1973): Item 32.

Becker, George Joseph. DH Lawrence. New York: F. Ungar, 1980.

Burke, Daniel. Beyond Interpretation: Studies in the Modern Short Story. Troy, NY: Whitston, 1991.

Consolo, Dominick P. The Rocking-Horse Winner. Columbus, OH: Charles E. Merrill, 1969.

innovative tradition. Many great authors began their careers by writing short stories. Many authors whom were/are already successful practice and hone their craft by writing short stories. In the 21st century, there are many writers who specialize in short story writing, and there are in fact, new genres of short story writing in fiction, such as flash fiction, which are super short stories. Short stories provide authors a space where there are fewer rules than longer forms of fiction and even nonfiction. Short stories, in a way, are like poetry. Though poems are often bound and structured by many kinds of forms and cadences, poetry is one of the most expressive and difficult forms of literature to construct. The same goes for short stories. Short stories, at first glance, are superficially simple, yet in order to exploit the genre to its fullest and deliver a poignant or gripping emotional…...

Destructors" by Graham Greene and "The Rocking Horse Winner" by DH Lawrence have little in common. However, when the emotional impact of each plot on the various characters is considered, it becomes clear that there are many points of comparison. Thus, this paper will compare and contrast the emotions experienced by selected characters in each story. In order to achieve this goal, issues such as children, adults and the emotions experienced in various ways by each are considered first. This is followed by a discussion of the end of the two works. Each story ends in a destruction that can be both compared and contrasted with each other.
Children as Main Characters

Both stories feature children as their main characters. It is also true that in each story the children in the roles of main character are somewhat unusual. In Greene's story for example, Trevor has a distinctly dark character. At…...

setting of a story can reveal important things about the narrative's larger meaning, because the setting implies certain things about the characters, context, and themes that would otherwise remain implicit or undiscussed. In their short stories "The Lottery" and "The Rocking-Horse inner," Shirley Jackson and DH Lawrence use particular settings in order to comment on the political and socio-economic status of their characters without inserting any explicitly political or socio-economic discussion into the narrative. In the case of "The Lottery," the setting transforms the story from a one of simple horror to a more nuanced critique of American society, and particularly its dedication to arbitrary, destructive beliefs. Lawrence's "The Rocking-Horse inner" makes a similar point, but in this case the setting serves to implicitly critique the consumerism encouraged by capitalist hegemony in England. Comparing and contrasting these two settings allows one to better understand how each story makes an…...

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Works Cited

Jackson, Shirley. The Lottery and Other Stories. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2005.

Lawrence, DH Selected Short Stories. Toronto: Dover Publications, 1993.

As with Lawrence's young protagonist, the burden of excellence becomes too great, and the girl feels she cannot provide for her family -- intellectually, rather than financially. The metaphor of the boy's rocking horse, endlessly rocking back and forth to churn out the names of winners in maddening repetition becomes transformed, in "Suicide Note," into another kind of repetitive metaphor, that of failed flight. The boy, who should have rode on a real horse into his future becomes locked in childhood, madness, and misery, trapped by the adult-sized needs of his family, and the girl, who should have sailed confidently into adulthood dies a failed attempt at flying. The girl is endlessly flapping her invisible wings to take flight but sinks to her death as she jumps to her demise, trying and failing to fly for real. The anonymous speaker of the poem is an adolescent, unlike Lawrence's child, and…...

Conflict Between Exterior and Interior Life
Kate Chopin's "The story of an Hour" offers a story behind a story. First it can be noted that this talks about Mr. And Mrs. Mallard. Mrs. Mallard received a news that her husband has just died. This prompted for a roller coaster of emotions to build inside her heart and mind.

First, she felt sadness. She was saddened by the fact that she is now alone and that her husband will no longer be with her. But the feeling of sadness did not stay for long in Mrs. Mallard's heart because she suddenly realized that she is now free. The death of her husband would mean that nobody will hurt her anymore. Because her husband is dead, nobody will discriminate her anymore. Nobody will make her feel that she is just a low or second class citizen. Nobody will prevent her from doing what she…...

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Reference:

Chopin, Kate. The Complete Works of Kate Chopin. Ed. Per Seyersted. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1969.

Goodman Brown/Lottery
Literature is frequently employed as a device for social and political commentary. This is certainly true in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," and Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." Both these stories darkly satirize the rigid social conventions that define small town American life. Even though they wrote about a century apart, Hawthorne and Jackson drew similar conclusions about American religious life and culture. Throughout his career, Nathaniel Hawthorne remained concerned about the hypocritical nature of puritanism. Stories like "Young Goodman Brown" darkly satirize religious fundamentalism and mob mentality. "Young Goodman Brown" is about a man who believes he might have dreamed of a strange pagan ritual set deep in the woods. Even his wife, ironically named Faith, attends the ritual. Faith's presumed faith in Christianity is proven false by her attending a Satanic rite in the woods. atching the ritual shocks Goodman Brown literally to death. In "The Lottery," a…...

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Works Cited

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "Young Goodman Brown." Retrieved online:  http://www.online-literature.com/poe/158/ 

Jackson, Shirley. "The Lottery." Retrieved online:  http://www.americanliterature.com/Jackson/SS/TheLottery.html