The Rocking Horse Winner is a story about a boy who drives himself mad trying to buy his mother's acceptance and love. His mother was a heartless woman who kept up the image of being the "perfect" wife and mother. Paul's mother didn't love anyone but herself. Paul had a rocking horse, one that somehow told him the winning horse of the horse races. His uncle would take him to the horse races and earn a lot of money that was to go to his mother. The Rocking Horse Winner is a story of greed, betrayal, and the tragic death of a child. I believe that there are multiple factors that led to Paul's death.
I believe that Paul accidentally killed himself. Using the rocking horse to see who won took a little bit of his soul, his innocence, from him. The rocking horse was something dark, malicious, evil, unnatural, and sinister. You could see it in Paul's eyes. "The boy watched him with big, blue eyes, that had an uncanny cold fire in them, and he never said a word." (Pg. 11) Every time he rode the rocking horse and used its black magic, it made him slowly spiral into insanity, gradually killing him. It made him dark, evil, and wrong.
The house's "whispering" also killed Paul. I think Paul had Schizophrenia. The "whispering" is a symptom of Schizophrenia. The symptoms include; bizarre behavior, hearing or seeing things that are not there, isolation, reduced emotion, problems paying attention, strongly held beliefs that are not real, delusions and hallucinations, and thoughts that "jump" between different topics. ( DSM IV Diagnostic System of Mental Illness) The "whispering" only added to Paul's heightened sense of hyper vigilance. Because of the use of the rocking horse, Paul began to lose whatever sanity he had previously held onto.
Paul's mother can also be held accountable for his death. His driven insanity may have been what closed the casket, but his mother is the one who dug and covered the grave with Paul buried six feet under the ground. Her selfishness and narcissistic attitude caused her to slack off in Paul's nurturing developmental needs. Paul aimed to please her and quiet the "whispering" of the house. His eager to please attitude towards his mother was a result of her negligence as a parent. By having his emotions heightened in a state of not wanting to disappoint, not wanting his mother to be unhappy, Paul eventually put her needs before his own. By putting her needs first, he began to fade and sink deeper into his distressed mental state; therefore, disappearing into his mind, disappearing into himself. His inability to accept his mother's incapability of love later drove him to not understand what was happening to him, and not accept his irreversible fate. Seeing Paul in his weakened and vulnerable state, his mother further tainted and twisted his mind, dissolving her own bitterness to reflect upon Paul' s own character, as if she was looking into a distorted mirror at a carnival. He was driven out of an apparent necessity of attention, love, and nurturing from a woman capable of doing absolutely none of those things.
Greed and betrayal killed Paul as well. The greed of the house, the family, the rocking horse, and even Paul himself led to Paul's demise. They say, when slipping into insanity, it's like being stuck under a bell jar. "Herever I sat- on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok- I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air."( . : Sylvia Plath; 1963, Terri Guillemets) You're slipping further and further until you've lost it. Frozen, stuck in the notion that you're fine, until you have no choice but to face it. You face it, and you freeze, you don't know what to do now that you've finally admitted that there was something wrong in the first place. "To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream." ( . : Sylvia Plath; 1963, Terri Guillemets)
In conclusion, Paul's death is to be blamed on greed, his mother, the "whispering", the rocking horse, and Paul himself. All of the reasons Paul died were caused by him keeping his condition to himself. He never realized what was happening to him. That was a part of his Schizophrenia playing into effect. Not even in death did he fathom the consequences of what using the rocking horse entailed.