Essay on Horses of the Night

We often encourage people to actively pursue their happiness and discourage them to escape from the reality. However, escaping is also a way of pursuing happiness, even though escaping will only provide temporary happiness and facing the reality will make true happiness possible. The short story “Horses of the Night” uses its character Chris to demonstrate the idea that individuals may escape from the miserable aspects of life to stay happy, however, individuals will compromise their ability to pursue true happiness if they escape.

Throughout the story, there are numerous times when Chris attempts to stay happy by blocking the harshness of reality away from him. For example, when he is unable to go to college, he went away to work as a salesman to save money to study. The problem with the method is that it is not possible for Chris to obtain enough money through the business because he is not a good salesman and his merchandise is not popular. However, Chris keeps telling Vanessa and others that he can do it, this shows that he is attempting to make himself believe that he can succeed too. That is also a form of blocking the hardness of reality away. As a result, Chris is able to stay hopeful and hope keeps him happy. However, that happiness is only temporary because he cannot always live in his fantasy and eventually he will be forced to admit that he cannot go to college and chase his dream. When Chris embraces his hope, he loses his ability to respond to the reality. This is because when Chris works as a salesman, he has this false hope that he will be able to save enough money for college, but the truth is that he cannot. However, that does not mean Chris cannot obtain enough money through some other methods, because there are a lot of people who worked their way to college, and Chris may as well do it if he tried a different job. Even if Chris simply cannot get the money he needs to become an engineer, which is very possible too since many of us simply will not make it through the adversities we face and we must admit that we are unable to do what we want, Chris can still pursue happiness because he can do other things as well. For example, if he liked to think, then being a librarian and read books might make him happy. However, Chris simply gives up and goes back farming and becomes unhappy. This shows that Chris is unable to think of some alternative method to pursue happiness other than using hope as an antidepressant. Later, Chris joins the army and is forced to kill. In response to that, Chris uses the ultimate escape of going crazy so he never needs to face or deal his adversities. Although normally we do not consider madness a positive thing, it does provide some happiness for Chris because he never needs to acknowledge the gap between his dream and his reality anymore. However, at the same time, Chris compromises his possibility of becoming truly happy because he can never becomes an engineer or some other roles and has sense of achievement in life.