Greed In The Rocking Horse Winner

Since the beginning of time, man has had an issue with greed. Adam and Eve, who had more than enough to eat, just had to have the “forbidden fruit”. According to Merriam-Webster, greed is defined as, “a selfish desire to have more of something (especially money) than needed”. It is very obvious that time after time, throughout history, greed has not only been problematic, but has essentially been the undoing of one society after the next and caused death, chaos and utter ruin, epitomized by the Tolstoy short story “How Much Land Does a Man Need?’ and the Lawrence short story, “The Rocking Horse Winner”. “The Rocking Horse Winner”, centers around a young boy named Paul, who is unloved by his mother and ignored by his father. His mother was

At the beginning of the story, Pahom’s wife and sister-in-law are arguing about whose lifestyle (shopkeeper’s wife or farmer’s wife) is better and more beneficial. Pahom is sitting by the stove listening to this argument. He then makes the comment, “If I had a little more land, I wouldn’t fear the devil himself!”, and the Devil of course hears him and accepts his challenge. Through the rest of the story, Pahom gains more and more land , and even goes so far as to move his entire family multiple times, just so he can gain more land. Pahom, while trying to encircle as much land as possible and get back to the starting line before sun down, collapses and dies. He ends up with six feet of land… just enough for his

The surfs themselves actually, “became comparable to that of slave and they could be sold to landowners in families or singly”. Pahom, with the “help” of Satan, caught a lucky break in the fact that the noble woman who owned the land they lived on, gave her land to the peasants, who then split it up among themselves. This would have been highly uncommon, due to the fact that serfdom was often a lifelong curse and commonly passed onto ones great-grandchildren. Pahom was one of the few that were able to climb the Russian social ladder just high enough to escape this deplorable station. Pahom, unfortunately, let his greed get the best of him and, unintentionally, started the process that ultimately resulted in his quite untimely