Shirley Jackson Literary Devices

“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson is a deceptively simple story about a small town community that holds an annual lottery. Naturally, what makes the plot less simple is the way the story ends with one of the townspeople being stoned as a result of “winning” the lottery. A deeper look at the story reveals that the story is about tradition. Although tradition is often considered to be something positive, in “The Lottery,” tradition is something undesirable and even deadly.

Jackson does not reveal the unethical and violent nature of the lottery until the very end, where the reader loses their earlier presumptions about an innocent lottery. Therefore, foreshadowing and suspense becomes a very large force in the story until the ending, and Jackson gives many hints to the reader. At the beginning of the story, children are found stuffing their pockets full and making towering piles of stones. Readers may brush this off as ordinary play of children, but in fact, it has a cruel purpose near the story’s end. Another area of foreshadowing is when Mr. Summers, the lottery’s organizer, asks the Watson boy to draw for him and his mother. Mr. Watson is not mentioned, like the other male head of households who pick for their families, so it can be assumed that Mr. Watson lost his life during the previous years’ lottery. All of this shows the juxtaposition between the seemingly everyday activities of the town and the cruel nature of what actually happens that day.

Charles is a child who is very disruptive and unruly in kindergarten. He hits the teacher, makes a little girl bleed, and makes another student say a bad word out loud. At the end of the story the mystery is who exactly Charles is. Laurie’s kindergarten teacher exclaims to his mother, ““Charles?” she said. “We don’t have any Charles in the kindergarten.”” Shirley Jackson uses many literary techniques to convey her story as a mystery. Throughout the story Jackson uses the point of view, dialogue, and context clues which to the audience conveys Charles an imaginary child who Laurie has created to put all his blame on.

    "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

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 Lottery by Shirley Jackson is a short story based on a fictional village that holds a macabre ritual. Although the regularity was not stated within the tale, the story speaks of a regular gathering of the village folk to conduct some form of lottery. In a disturbing twist of the tale, the winner of the lottery doesn’t get to receive a prize, but instead, suffer the indignity of being killed by getting stoned to death by friends, family, and neighbors. Mrs. Hutchinson is the unfortunate soul, who, despite her pleas and protests has no option but accept her fate. In a similarly titled story, The Lottery by Chris Abani talks about an incident he witnessed when he went to the market with his aunt. In the story, Abani explains how he

The story “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson is about a town’s tradition of ‘the lottery’. It takes place in an ordinary town, but has a tradition of a lottery in which the ‘winner’ gets stoned. Most people in the town want to keep the lottery, as it is tradition and is important to the town’s history. Other lines in the story suggest the town’s people seem like they want to stop it. A lesson the story suggests is tradition is not always a good thing.

Mrs. Delacroix can be seen being friendly and nice to Mrs. Hutchinson at the beginning and they are even joking with each other. On the other hand after Mrs. Hutchinson gets chosen to “win the prize” Mrs. Delacroix picks a stone that she can barely even carry. You can also see this happen when people are giving little Davy Hutchinson some pebbles to stone his own family member. People are trying to give a little child stones to stone his own mother, that shows how blinded by tradition they are. As Tessie Hutchinson is getting stoned, someone from her community puts a stone in her son's hand. Even the closest family member participates in the horror. Villagers in this story are greatly blinded by tradition they need to take a step into reality and realize what harm they are doing. On the basis of how they treat the black box by keeping it at random places it is clear that they are scared by the box and lottery. They are keeping it just for the sake of tradition and terrified to change it like lottery tradition even though some of other rituals of lottery have vanished. At one point in the story someone suggests this but is immediately shut down by old man Warner. Old Man Warner who has been attending the lottery for long time said that,  villagers would be crazy to give up the lottery. When Mr. Adam told old man Warner that the north village was talking about giving up the lottery, old man Warner snorted, “Pack of

People think winning the lottery is a good thing. However, in Shirley Jackson’s story, “The Lottery” the winner gets something very crucial, getting stoned to death. Shirley Jackson uses, foreshadowing, the attitude of the villagers, and the subtleness of the black box, to provide the gruesome ending of the story for the reader. Making the story, eerie, serious, and horrifying, the story takes an unexpected twist; the reader will soon realize that the lottery is not what they thought it would be.

“The Lottery” written by Shirley Jackson exemplifies a short story written in 1948. The story tells a tale of a small village in which they stone one of their own. Throughout the village, there are civilians who are opposed to the lottery and others who are for it. Shirley Jackson develops a thematic theme of Isolation and Deprivation through the setting and it’s characters.

It has been said that reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are. For a reader to actually go anywhere in the book, the author must keep the reader interested. This can be done by using the correct literary devices to develop the theme into something extraordinary. “The lottery” by Shirley Jackson uses a few distinct literary devices, that created an interesting and immersive story. Using the rhetorical triangle, symbolism, and tone Mrs. Jackson was able to express her unique theme about staying true to traditions.

“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson is a story that happens in a small village with roughly 300 citizens. She was a native of San Fransico, who wrote many conventional novels. Her purpose in writing the story is to graphically demonstrate, pointless violence, and general inhumanity in people lives (Kennedy, Gioia, and Revoyr (2013). The story happens during the summer, while the children are out of school portraying formally a longtime ritual grounded in tradition. Consequently, individuals who wins the lottery will be stoned to death in a selected at random. It was no rational cause or justification for singling out one person in the village to murder each year. Similarly, the lottery reminds me of the stoning I have read in the Bible concerning

Afterwards, when The Lottery is finished, and who is determined “the winner” the villagers become absolutely vicious, by picking up stones and attacking Mrs. Hutchinson by throwing stones of all sizes at her. Once again, looking back on a ruthless ritual that no one really knows why they are still participating in it, while other villages in the area have dissolved this tradition. It is almost unthinkable when Shirley Jackson writes “Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones;…eventually made a great pile of stones in one corner of the square and guarded it against the raids of the other boys”.(Jackson) These are the children of the villagers

“The Lottery” a short story by Shirley Jackson, features a small town during the time of their lottery. The lottery is an annual event, organized by Mr. Summers. It is a highly important time, as the whole town comes to the town square on the day of the lottery. The guidelines are quite simple: everyone takes a slip of paper out of the symbolic black box, and the slip of paper with the black mark carved on it, is the “lucky winner”. But their definition of the lottery is different一usually, a lottery is a valuable thing to win. But when Tessie Hutchinson, the “lucky winner” gets her reward by getting stoned to death by the rest of the villagers, it is clear that winning this lottery can't be a good affair... So what is the purpose of this lottery? Rather than discontinuing the lottery, the town continues with it because they don't want to upset an old tradition.

In Shirley Jackson’s, “The Lottery”, tells the story of a small town that gathers once a year to do a lottery. This isn’t your typical lottery. In this lottery the winner loses instead of winning. The winner is stoned to death as a part of “tradition”. The town people blindly follow this tradition and are unwilling to change. Tradition is one of the main themes in this story and it should be left alone.