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Essay Comparing Most Dangerous Game And The Lottery

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The short stories “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell and “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson are both very alike yet very different. Throughout the short stories “The Most Dangerous Game” and “The Lottery”, Connell and Jackson use a tone of casualness to develop the theme of senseless killings in an established society.
The tone of casualness is prevalent in both of the short stories. The character General Zaroff from “The Most Dangerous Game” was a particularly evil person. He was an avid hunter of special game but quickly became bored with the easiness of hunting animals. Zaroff believed, “hunting had ceased to be what you call ‘a sporting proposition’. It had become to easy” (Connell, 1990). General Zaroff decided that he would take it upon himself to create a new sort of hunting, one that entailed hunting human beings. Rainsford, an unfortunate character that unintentionally ended up on the Zaroff’s island, strongly disputed Zaroff’s idea of …show more content…

In “The Most Dangerous Game” General Zaroff decided that hunting animals was no longer entertaining enough, so he chose to create a new form of hunting, hunting humans. General Zaroff believed that, “hunting had ceased to be what you call a ‘sporting proposition’. It had become too easy” (Connell, 1990). For Zaroff, committing murder was a simple solution to an inconvenient problem. In “The Lottery” the people of the town were so oblivious to why they were participating in the stoning every year, that they had no reason to think there could be a problem with what they were doing. When asked why there was a lottery, the answer was because, “there’s always been a lottery” (Jackson, 1948). The people had forgotten all the surrounding traditions, but the one thing they remembered was that whoever selected the slip of paper with the black dot was to be stoned by all of the

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