Fiction Essay

Graham Greene’s “The Destructors” and D. H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking Horse Winner” are very different stories, but both have similarities. “The Destructors” and “The Rocking Horse Winner” were both written by British authors and set in a post war Great Britain. Both stories were written after a World War, so the living conditions were still depressed. I will compare and contrast the authors’ choice of themes and characters, emotions, materialism, use of suspense, and setting.

The themes of both stories are developed around the characters of the stories, especially on the children in each story. The characters in “The Destructors” are not as fully developed as the characters in “The Rocking Horse Winner”. The only two characters that Green developed were Trevor, better known as “T”, and Mr. Thomas, also referred to as Old Misery. Trevor was the outsider that quickly became the leader of the gang. Old Misery was an architect that lived in a house that was falling apart but was pretty much the only building still standing in that area. The destruction of this house becomes the challenge and the focus for Trevor and the rest of the characters who are gathered together as the Wormsley gang. They have grown up together and share the experience of bombs falling on their town. “The Rocking Horse Winner” has characters that are a little more rounded. Paul, the boy in the story, his mother, his Uncle, and Bassett the gardener are in constant trouble over poverty. Paul has an obsessive desire to become lucky, due to the fact of his mother’s obsession with luck. His mother believes that luck is money. He constantly hears the house whispering over and over the phrase, “…there must be more money…there must be more money”. He knows that even though his mother appears to love him supposedly, that she does not love him on the inside. Paul believes that if he can