In the beginning of “Horses of the Night” Chris is an optimistic young man with big dreams and goals for his life. However, he is growing up during The Great Depression and the beginnings of World War II, so the realities and hardships of the society he lives in prevent him from realizing these goals at every turn. Chris’s dreams start out both admirable and reasonable. He wants to go to college and become a civil engineer, but his impoverished hometown, Shallow Creek, doesn’t have a high school, so he must move into his grandfather’s house in Manawaka where he can continue his education. After high school, however, his family’s poverty, and his unwilling and unsupportive grandfather, make it impossible for him to attend college. So, he becomes a traveling salesman and believes this enterprise will make enough money to fund his college education. As his Aunt Beth and Uncle Ewen point out, however, the Depression means no one has disposable income to spend on the vacuums, magazines, or knitting machines he wants to sell. Again, the limitations of his society prevent him from achieving his dreams, and every time the realities of society crush these dreams, Chris’s new dreams become more unreasonable and unrealistic. Eventually, he gives up on college and is forced to return to his humble origins to work on his family’s farm. His final breaking point is when he succumbs to his bleak reality and joins the army at the outset of World War II. The war proves too much, is too at odds with his dreams and ideals, and it forces him into the madness that will confine him to a mental hospital for the rest of his life. In the end, the Great Depression, World War II, and the conditions they each impose prevent him from living the life he dreamed. At the same time, they both contribute to what Vanessa later realizes was his own struggle with depression, until the point where his mental health becomes completely unrecoverable. In this way, Chris’s story suggests that madness is not simply due to internal factors, but that the limitations and injustices of society can drive one into madness, too.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Madness and Society ThemeTracker
Madness and Society Quotes in Horses of the Night
He hardly ever talked about it, but this once he told me about seeing the horses in the mud, actually going under, you know? And the way their eyes looked when they realised they weren’t going to get out. Ever seen horses’ eyes when they’re afraid, I mean really berserk with fear, like in a bush-fire? Ewen said a guy tended to concentrate on the horses because he didn’t dare think what was happening to the men.
I was thinking of all the schemes he’d had, the ones that couldn’t possibly have worked, the unreal solutions to which he’d clung because there were no others, the brave and useless strokes of fantasy against a depression that was both the world’s and his own.
Well – what it said was that they could force his body to march and even to kill, but what they didn’t know was that he’d fooled them. He didn’t live inside it any more […] the letter seemed only the final heartbreaking extension of the way he’d always had of distancing himself from the absolute unbearability of battle.
Slowly, slowly, horses of the night – The night must move like this for him, slowly, all through the days and nights. I could not know whether the land he journeyed through was inhabited by terrors, the old monster-kings of the lake, or whether he had discovered at last a way for himself to make the necessary dream perpetual.
