Compare And Contrast The Lottery And The Most Dangerous Game

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” both tell stories using literary techniques of tone, symbolism, and irony that help to convey stories that leave the reader baffled by their ending. Although Hawthorne and Jackson utilize these literary techniques in a different way, both of the stories end with a sense of darkness.

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.

The Lottery, written by Shirley Jackson, is about a small town that dedicates a day to killing one person from the town by stones. The head of the household each draw a paper from the box and whoever receives the one with the black dot, their family has to draw again. Whichever family member has the black dot, essentially wins the lottery. One character in the story, Old Man Warner, has survived each lottery that has happened. Warner has a lack of guilt and claims the lottery should be an occurrence each year. The mention of discontinuing the lottery irritates Warner. “‘Pack of crazy fools,’ he said… ‘There’s always been a lottery…’” (Jackson). He also expresses his dislike for the lack of seriousness when he comments on Mr. Summers, a man “who had the time and energy to devote to civic activities” (Jackson), joking around with the crowd. Perhaps the reason Old Man Warner is accepting towards this event is because this is the “Seventy-seventh year [he][has] been in the lottery” (Jackson). He also comments on how the people have changed. Exclaiming “‘It’s not the way it used to be… People ain’t the way they used to be’” (Jackson). Warner feels no remorse towards the lottery and believes it should continue as a tradition.

Dystopian stories works depict a negative view of "the way the world is supposedly going in order to provide urgent propaganda for a change in direction”. Often these stories have many themes that can relate to the real world. In the dystopian story “The Lottery” written by Shirley Jackson, many themes such as false hopes,hypocrisy, ritual, and mob mentality are expressed throughout the story. In the story everyone in a small village gather in the town square for the lottery, whoever gets chosen gets stoned to death by everyone in the town including friends and loved ones. The use of different themes throughout the story relate to the literary devices and universal storytelling elements setting, verbal irony, symbolism, and social cohesion.

When a loving, caring, family oriented, women come in conflict with the horrible, despicable, inhumane lottery in a situation in which the town goes together, the results may be a terrible end in a young life. In “The Lottery” written by, Shirley Jackson, the main character Mrs. Tessie Hutchinson’s and the town folk are the main characters of this story. In “The Lottery” Shirley Jackson uses the use of characterization to portray the main ideas of the story. Shirley Jackson also uses the use of plot structure and the point of view in which the story is being told. The Lottery is a way to make a sacrifice for a good harvest in the upcoming season.

As Tessie’s protests continue and the Hutchinson family prepares to draw again the sense of apprehension is one again mounting, this time fearing for whoever wins yet still not knowing what their “prize” will be. “The crowd was quiet. A girl whispered, ‘I hope it’s not Nancy’”, the silence and fear of the crowds manifests in the reader as the three children and their parents all draw slips of paper. Tessie “wins” the lottery and when the narrator explains “although the villagers had forgotten the ritual, and lost they original black box, they still remembered to use stones” (6) its suddenly shockingly clear to the readers what the winner is to receive. The drastic switch from a light and cheerful tone with talk of the beautiful day and children playing to the closing like of “and they were upon her” (7) is in part why this story is so effective. The unforeseen sinister end of the story makes the revelation of the tradition much more shocking and unsettling than had the reader known from the beginning what the outcome would be. Jackson very effectively builds a sense of apprehension and foreboding as she slowly cues the reader into the reality of the situation.

    "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

Although both stories end with the death of a character, the conflicts are mostly different and do not take similar paths. In “The Lottery” it is hard to truly know the conflict throughout the story. The conflict of the individual vs. society is only apparent at the end. The conflict arises when Bill (Tessie's husband) picks out a piece of paper from the lottery box, and his piece of paper has a black dot in the middle of his slip of paper. Tessie sees his paper and starts yelling at people, particularly Mr. Summers, the man who conducts the lottery. She was yelling at him because she had thought that he didn’t give her husband enough time to pick out a slip of paper. So, in the end the town stones Tessie to death, which makes the conflict clear that it is man (woman) vs. society.

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson is very similar to The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. The Hunger Games is a seventy-four-year-old lottery that selects twenty-four kids, as young as thirteen, and sends them into a rink to fight to the death. The Lottery is about a lottery that has been going on for more than seventy years, where the village selects one person to stone to death. The two stories may have different plot lines, but they have similar themes, including tradition, a dystopian society, and protagonists standing up for justice. Both of these stories are very akin and hold a very harsh lesson.

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

Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game" and Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" both attempt to provide their readers with the cruel truth regarding how it is typically human to express interest in cold-blooded acts. These two short stories discuss about people who see nothing wrong with promoting criminal behavior, but who eventually come to acknowledge the horrible position that the victim is in by experiencing it from a first-person perspective. Sanger Rainsford, and, respectively, Tessie Hutchinson are the central characters in these two stories and they are unable to complexly understand the situation that a victim is in until they actually realize that they are the victims.

After reading "The Lottery," I decided that I wanted to use it for my first paper. However, when I started thinking about the work I wanted to contrast it to, I found it rather difficult. My first thought was to use "The Story of an Hour" for its similarities of female roles in society. My second thought was using "The Cask of Amontillado," but I was not exactly sure where the similarities between the two lied. As such, I attached a scan of what I have come to discover about the two works.

“The Lottery” Compare and Contrast “The Lottery” short story and The lottery film, being the same story, are alot alike. Even though they are alike, they also have a few differences. Most of the differences between the film and the short story are mostly line changes. The beginning of the film and the short story are the same. It starts out outside on a beautiful day.

In one way or another, heeding tradition with trust ultimately leads both Tessie Hutchinson and the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” to their own respective undoing. For Tessie Hutchinson, it is her own blindness and complacency with the ritual of the lottery, a glorified murder, that sees her to what is perhaps the ultimate consequence: death. Her conviction in the practices of the lottery is so deeply engrained that it becomes an irrelevancy in her mind. She is so accustomed to participating in stoning someone else to death that any semblance of empathy is eliminated from her emotions; at one point, Tessie even goes so far as to ensure her daughter picks from the lottery as to have less of a chance herself of being chosen to die. The prospect of tradition, continuing with what has always has been done, erases any loyalty to friends, family, and community—all in the name of

My two books for this comparison essay are “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. “The Lottery” is about the towns people drawing out slips of paper and seeing who gets the slip of paper with the black pencil dot; whereas The Hunger Games is about Katniss taking her sister's place when she she's called into the Hunger Games and trying to survive in the arena with Peeta in the Hunger Games. This book ends with Katniss and Peeta winning the Hunger Games and the two of them returning to District 12 with mixed feelings for each other, and an unforgettable experience. There are many similarities between these two books.