Argument Essay on the Lottery by Shirley Jackson with Works Cited Page

    "The Lottery," a short story written by Shirley Jackson, is a tale about a disturbing social practice.  The setting takes place in a small village consisting of about three hundred denizens.  On June twenty-seventh of every year, the members of this traditional community hold a village-wide lottery in which everyone is expected to participate.  Throughout the story, the reader gets an odd feeling regarding the residents and their annual practice.  Not until the end does he or she gets to know what the lottery is about.  Thus, from the beginning of the story until almost the end, there is an overwhelming sense that something terrible is about to happen due to the Jackson's effective

Many of the people living in the village have come from a variety of lives before moving into the community. Some old, some new, and often have been alone most of their life.

They are an active community of which all engage in the same ritual. Although the ritual is unethical, it is safe to say that all types of people in this town work together, creating a similar culture amongst everyone. Also, this particular town creates a cultural body, as referred to as Scholes, based on their households. A family in this village consisted of a mother, father, and a couple of children. The mother was the caregiver, cooker and cleaner, the father was the workingman, and the children went to school and came home. The boys would help their fathers with house work involving tools and the girls would learn from their mothers the ways of caregiving and so on.

It can be hard sometimes to keep going when someone is demeaning you. Some evidence that shows the villagers came around is when a villager says “You don’t look like champions in those clothes! You’ll look better in these!”as the villager picks up a fresh new soccer shirt. This connects to my reason because now they are supporting the boys by giving them encouragment and the vision to support their

In this story, they keep at one time year tradition, in which they get everyone to meet during carnival season and everyone living in the village has to attend. What I think is wrong with this story is how they kill them and the reason they do it. What they do is basically if you pick a paper with something on it you are immediately surrounded by everyone and they all pick up a rock and throw it at you. Eventually, the person they threw the rocks at dies and everyone goes back to what they were doing

villagers could've easily noticed that they weren't a threat such as the rebels of RUF. Is think that

Here stood a village, an ordinary village, consisting of farms, markets, wells, and a fair amount of houses for its population. It is the Thorpes village. It has everything any other village has, but it is very small, both in size in population. This is strange due to its age, as it’s one of the oldest villages in the area. It has always remained small and always will be due to a savage tradition made by the village’s founder, Amund Thorpes. The tradition states as follows: ‘No two people shall share their day of birth in Thorpes. If this occurs, the village people must decide to sacrifice one of the two.’

First published in the June 26, 1948 issue of The New Yorker, the short story “The Lottery” written by Shirley Jackson, portrays a village in present-day America which has an annual tradition identified by the characters and narrator as "the lottery". The story is told from a third-person objective point of view, and involves the elements of conflict and character to portray substantial roles in (regards to) how the story develops. “Conflict” is defined as “the struggle or encounter within the plot of two opposing forces that serves to create reader or audience interest and suspense” (Fiction 100: 1296), while character is defined as “an individual within a literary work” that “may be complex and well developed or undifferentiated and one-dimensional” (Fiction 100: 1295). In “The Lottery”, Jackson uses both conflict and character in order to develop the themes of tradition, gender roles and family.

The villagers fear the

For most of us, the village is our entire world. We were born here and will live here our entire lives, hardly venturing more than a few miles beyond. We need not go anywhere else because we have almost everything we need right here. Village craftsmen make shoes, tools, building materials, and furniture, and we grow our food. The only things we must bring in are salt and a few iron tools and utensils.

Though the villagers are a group of people with varying

This situation weakens Dumont and Pocock’s assertion that there is only one tradition. Analytically it may be useful to consider village practices as an integral whole, but the villagers themselves recognize the existence of another, more prestigious tradition.

Usually, when living in a small town, the townspeople always have something in common, which is hope. For the villagers in this story, they have no hope left. The land was so little that mothers “fear that the wind would carry off their children.” Villagers live in “twenty-odd wooden houses” and they had “stone courtyards”

Another reason why things began to fall apart in this community is because some of the villages decided to change their religion to Christianity. In the eyes of the faithful people, who decided to stick with their current religion, these people who changed their views are traitors. Many of the members who stuck with their religion wanted the people who converted to Christianity to be punished. They also put bribes on the white men, asking for cowries in return for their life to be spared. If any killings occurred then this would cause chaos because the white men would retaliate against the villagers, causing a war between the two different groups.

In There You Go!, the main characters come in the village thinking their way of living is better and do everything they can to change the village. They don't listen to what the villagers have to say regarding their lifestyle or culture. They don't see that maybe they are wrong and the villagers happy.