Horses of the Night

Personal Response: Horses of the Night

In the short story, “Horses of the Night”, the author, Margaret Laurence, discusses the idea of escaping reality. Chris, the male protagonist, is the character who is trying to escape reality. Chris is a young man who is struggling with life, and in order to escape his life, he dreams up his own world where anything can happen. Chris doesn’t understand reality, and he doesn’t want to be a part of it either. In the story it seems like certain things don’t bother him. When grandfather Conner was complaining about how Chris was in Manawaka on his money and not his parents, Chris didn’t do anything. Grandfather Conner always tried to make Chris feel guilty for staying in Manawaka with him. He rubbed it in Chris’s face that his family, back in Shallow Creek, had no money. Chris acted as though he wasn’t affected by these comments by his grandfather. “I felt the old rage of helplessness. But as for Chris-he gave no sign of feeling anything.”-pg.285. When Chris was with Vanessa, he would often talk about Shallow Creek. He would talk about his two riding horses Duchess and Firefly, and how they are perfectly matched to be racing horses. But to Vanessa’s disappointment this was only another one of Chris’s illusions. They were not racing horses, but two old lanky horses who were unevenly matched and didn’t work well together. When Chris was done high school, and he was told that he couldn’t go to college, he didn’t seemed to be affected once again. In the story he made it sound as if he wanted to go to college so badly to become and engineer and build huge cable bridges like the Golden Gate Bridge. But, once again he just shrugged it off and didn’t seem to care anymore. “My Mother had said, “He’s taken in amazingly well-he doesn’t even mention it, so we mustn’t either.””- pg.290. Since Chris couldn’t go to college he shifted from one worthless job to the next, most of the time being