Horses Of The Night Character Analysis

We often encourage people to actively pursue their happiness while also wanting to discourage them to escape from reality. However, avoiding your issues is also a way of pursuing happiness, even though this route will prove to be temporary. In the literary piece, “Horses of the Night” by Margaret Laurence, the author describes the story of a boy named Chris, who, due to his financial conditions, is forced to move from his home in Shallow Creek to dwell in Manawaka, in order to attend high school. Chris’ character is used to demonstrate the idea that individuals may escape from the miserable aspects of their lives in order to stay happy. Through the course of this work, you witness the changes Chris undergoes, through the eyes of his six-year-old cousin Vanessa, which ultimately lead to his downfall.

Initially, in Laurence’s story, we see a “tall, and lanky [boy] with an angular face, the bones showing through his brown

A few months after the war begins and since he has no other options, Chris leaves Shallow Creek and joins the army. Portrayed throughout the course of the story as someone who has avoided conflict his entire life, this does not seem like the ideal situation for him to be in; this is proven through the letter Vanessa receives six months following his departure. Although she refuses to reveal the contents to her mother, Vanessa discovers that he has been put into the provincial mental hospital because of a mental breakdown, and furthermore due to the fact that he was now violent; this was a term that Vanessa could never “associate...with Chris, who had been so much the reverse”(69). Due to reconsideration of the details leading up to this point, including their talk on the night they went out camping, she soon realizes that all the optimism Chris portrayed, was to suppress his underlying