Comparative Literature - "The Lottery" vs. "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"

Shirley Jackson is often regarded as one of the most brilliant authors of the twentieth century. Born in San Francisco in 1916, she spent the majority of her adolescence writing short stories and poetry (Allen). While she is known best for her supernatural stories, one of her most popular works is a short story called “The Lottery”. The lottery takes place in a small village in which once a year on June 24th, the town population is gathered. After the gathering, there is a drawing to see which family is chosen, after the family is chosen, another drawing takes place to see who is stoned to death. In the New Yorker's magazine book review hailed “The Lottery” as “one of the most haunting and shocking short stories of modern America and is one of the most frequently anthologized” (Jackson). This review stems heavily from Jackson’s brilliant use of irony, symbolism, and foreshadowing. However, perhaps what truly stands out is how Jackson is able to wrap all of those elements together as a way to show an overarching theme of the corruption that exists in human nature. While the real source of “The Lottery’s” inspiration is unclear, there has been heavy speculation that the roots lie heavily in the actions of the holocaust and the actions that took place during World War II. Regardless of the source material, a general consensus can be made that the plot of the lottery is a dark reflection of human actions.

The purpose of this paper will be the comparing and contrasting of two short stories previously read and interpreted by the writer. The two stories chosen were “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, and “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell. These two stories seem to have nothing in common, as they have two separate meanings in two separate eras. However, the moral of each story draws similarity, the author’s paints a picture to keep the audience open minded therefore connecting them in distinct ways.

THESIS: The themes of Shirley Jackson’s, “The Lottery” and D.H. Lawrence’s, “The Rocking-Horse Winner” demonstrate a very powerful and sinister aspect of fallen human nature. The characters in both of these stories are driven to what many would describe as insanity in the pursuit of a passion. Ultimately, these pursuits end in unimaginable tragedy and pain.

The Lottery, and Christianity Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery”, if left at face value, is a perverse tale of a small village sacrificial ceremony, which leaves a lasting impression upon the reader. However to take the story at face value would nearly be an exercise in futility, for then the reader would be missing the deeper meanings found in the delicate symbolism that Jackson places throughout the tale.

The people of Omelas get to experience “The sense of victory, surely, the celebration of courage.” (LeGuin, 1). They even speak about “The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial.” (LeGuin, 1). Which differs greatly from “The Lottery” seeing as their sacrifice is basically just a slaughter whereas in “The One’s That Walk Away From Omelas” they only make a child suffer continually, rather than killing them. Either way both receive success from these horrid sacrifices. Without the sacrifice both utopian societies would be anything but perfect. For “The One’s Who Walk Away From Omelas” success is simply having fast little trains and no guilt for anyone in the town. In “The Lottery” their main success is yielding a perfect crop season, “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.”(Jackson,

Within the first few lines of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" we are faced with such adjectives as clear, sunny, fresh and warmth. She goes on to paint a picture of small children just out of school for the summer, as the townspeople gather for the annual Lottery. This leads us to believe that the rest of the story is as cheery as the summer day initially described. We as the readers are virtually unaware of the horrible senseless events that lie ahead. Through the use of symbolism Shirley Jackson reveals the underlying decay of ethics that results from an empty ritual followed by narrow-minded people.

Looking at both stories, the Lottery appears to be a means of how the town remain at a low population and that the Lottery was a way of controlling that population. The Rocking-Horse Winner on the other hand uses gambling as an alternative to making money and that money is earned by being lucky and that you had to have an imagination in order to possess this luck. The Lottery focused its story around an ancient black wooden box that held the Lottery choices within it and the Rocking-Horse Winner was focused upon an old style Rocking Horse that was often used by children long ago and something that is not used today that often. Both endings of each story were odd enough whereas in the Lottery, the death of another person came as a ritual that was expected to happen so very often and in the Rocking-Horse Winner, Master Paul, the woman’s son sought the approval of his Mother concerning his having luck. The boy died that night and the Mother had not acknowledged that she knew that her son was lucky even though she was eighty –odd thousand to the good. Very odd turn of events in both stories and both had unusual endings in which there seems to be that type of contrast. Not that they were similar in story form but that they both ended in sadness. Of the two stories, I would choose the Rocking-Horse Winner as the favorite of the two due to the fact that the Lottery goes against the belief that I

In her story “The Lottery”, Shirley Jackson manages to catch the readers’ attention and ultimately shock them with an unexpected ending; all of which help her emphasize her critique toward the dark side of human nature and the evil that resides, sometimes, in those who we less expect it from. Jackson uses symbolism throughout the story that helps her set the mood and also makes the readers wonder and analyze the senseless violence and cruelty in their own lives.

Before I start to write this paper, I have to say that I literally like this passage “The Lottery”, because it reflects many of the problems that exist in today’s society. The passage “ Lottery ” has several visible subjects and symbols as well as some that are not easy to find them. I personally found that one of the main subjects to this article is tradition. Later on I figured out that the tone is a very significant element in the article. Shirley Jackson uses the tone in "The Lottery" is not entirely same with the subjects mentioned above. I compared with the previous articles that we have read which was “The One Who walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula Le Guin, he uses a satirical tone to describe utopianism; nevertheless, let’s return to this article, Shirley Jackson uses a very light tone, but at the end of the passage, I can see that there’s a dark ending in the story.

Society today sees the lottery as an easy way to win a ginormous amount of cash just by buying a little slip of paper with a combination of numbers. The irony that Shirley Jackson uses in her short story, The Lottery, is used to the extreme by not only the title being ironic, but also within the story. The lottery is seen as a way to gain cash, but the ironic part of the title is that the reader sees it and thinks that the story will be about someone winning a big prize, yet the winner is sentenced to being stoned to death. Within the story, Shirley Jackson writes about how one member of the community ultimately chooses who wins the lottery. Another ironic thing about someone chooses the winner is that one of the communities sons picked his own father to win the lottery. Linda Wagner-Martin analyzes The Lottery and its irony by writing, “Bringing in the small children as she does, from early in the story (they are gathering stones, piling them up where they will be handy, and participating in the ritual as if it were a kind of play), creates a poignance not only for the death of Tessie the mother, but for the sympathy the crowd gives to the youngest Hutchinson, little Dave. Having the child draw his own slip of paper from the box reinforces the normality of the occasion, and thereby adds to Jackson's irony. It is family members, women and children, and fellow residents who are being killed through this orderly, ritualized process. As Jackson herself once wrote, "I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village, to shock the story's

The two stories are both centered on a particular person in the story. “The Lottery” was centered round Tessie Hutchinsen who happened to be the unlucky one to have picked the

According to Helen E. Nebeker, most acknowledge the energy of The Lottery, admitting that the psychological stun of the ritual murder in a modern, rural small-town cannot be easily overlooked. Virgil Scott, for instance, says, “the story leaves me uneasy because of the author's use of incidental symbolism: the black box, the forgotten tuneless chant, the ritual salute to assure the entire recreation of the procedure of the lottery forget to serve the story as they may have.” At that point, they indicate fundamental weakness by acknowledging that Jackson has preferred to give no answer to her story, but it leaves the meaning to our imagination, allowing a good deal of flexibility in our interpretation, while yet demanding that everything in the story has been obtained to assure us how we are to 'take' the ending events in the story. Maybe the critical conflict depicted above comes from failure to see that The Lottery really intertwines two stories and subjects into a fictional vehicle. The obvious, easily discovered story shows up in the facts, wherein members of a small town meet to decide who will be the next victim of the annual savagery. The symbolic hints which develop into a second, sub rosa story becomes apparent as early as the fourth word of the story when the date of June 27th alerts us to the season of the summertime with all its connotation of ancient ritual. From the symbolic development of the black box, the story shifts quickly to climax.

As the plot of the stories unfolds, the greater influence of violent tensions become evident. In The Lottery, people follow the tradition despite its cruelty and absurdity. Although the ritual of the lottery is brutal, the dwellers of the village do not seem to see how barbaric it is because “there’s always been a lottery” (Jackson, 1982, p. 118). Nevertheless, the tensions grow when the lottery begin and every citizen is awaiting for its end. The climatic moment of the story grows when the reader discovers that Tess

that farming is a way of life that is handed down from generation to generation,

Throughout both “The Lottery” and “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” an ideal world or utopia is portrayed. In the beginning of “The Lottery” the narrator describes what a beautiful summer day it is and how the village people are gathering to begin the lottery. The tone of the story is happy, content and quite joyful; even though the lottery is nothing to be excited about. The story even says that, “[the men] grinned at one another humorlessly and nervously” (Jackson 250). The townspeople see the lottery as a harmless