The Lottery By Shirley Hutchinson Analysis

“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson was written in 1948. The story takes place in a village square of a town on June 27th. The author does not use much emotion in the writing to show how the barbaric act that is going on is look at as normal. This story is about a town that has a lottery once a year to choose who should be sacrificed, so that the town will have a plentiful year for growing crops. Jackson has many messages about human nature in this short story. The most important message she conveys is how cruel and violent people can be to one another. Another very significant message she conveys is how custom and tradition can hold great power over people. Jackson also conveys the message of

“The Lottery” is a short story by Shirley Jackson, first published on June 26, 1948. The story was initially met with negative critical reception due to its violent nature and portrayal of the potentially dangerous nature of human society. It was even banned in some countries. However, “The Lottery” is now widely accepted as a classic American short story and is used in classrooms throughout the country.

Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” is a story littered with warnings and subtext about the dangers a submissive society can pose. While the opening is deceptively cheery and light Jackson uses an array of symbols and ominous syntax to help create the apprehensive and grim tone the story ends with. Her portrayal of the town folk as blindly following tradition represents the world during World War II when people’s failure to not mindlessly accept and heed authority lead to disastrous consequences. . Shirley Jackson uses a large array of techniques to help convey the idea that recklessly following and accepting traditions and orders can lead to disastrous consequences.

Traditions are widespread among many different people and cultures; It is an explanation for acting without thinking. Not all traditions are a good thing, though, and blindly following them can lead to harsh consequences. The villagers in a small town in “The Lottery” gather together annually to participate in this tradition, where one person in the town is randomly chosen in a drawing to be violently stoned to death by citizens. It has been around for seventy-seven years and everyone partakes in it. People always attend, showing the importance of tradition amongst the society. However, in the short story, “The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson uses many literary devices to show that traditions are not always meant to be followed.

Whether we live in the past or the future, we will always see people making the same mistake repeatedly. In stories The Lottery and Battle Royal, Shirley Jackson and Ralph Ellison purposely write about subjects that the public continuously harass without definite solutions over the past sixty years. While Jackson discusses the superfluous traditions using her unique style, Ellison focuses on segregation of the black communities through a view of a young black man. Such are the issues the two author brought up that are still in discussion and yet have been resolved. In fact, we can still observe the events the authors created exists today as a modified twenty-first-century version of the situations.

Nowadays, when we know death does not help crops grow, but the village does it anyway. The lottery is conducted from a sense of tradition and commitment to the past. The villagers are not sure what the lottery was exactly like back then “Because so much of the ritual has been forgotten or discarded” (Page 49, line 93). The original ritual might have been different, or just not favorable by the town, but he most painful part, the death of a person, was kept as a way of honoring the past. In addition, we can see how the younger , more modern generation is okay with this because the town elders encourage it as well. It is so encouraged, that “someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles” (Page 58, line 421). These villagers are making a

To start, the theme I chose for these two articles that we will be comparing and contrasting is standing up for what is right may not be the easiest path. This means that when you are thinking about standing up for someone and no one else starts to, it may be hard for you to start standing up for someone. In “The Lottery” Tessie Hutchinson and her family live in a town that do this thing called the lottery, but you don’t win any money during this “lottery”, you get the prize of death. In “First They Came…” Martin Niemoller expresses his point of view on how he did not speak out for people in danger, when he should have. I chose this theme, because in both “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson and “First They Came…” by Martin Niemoller there are some people that could have stood up for each other but no one around them did so they didn’t want to. These two articles are alike, because people die in both of these “events”. This shows that in “First They Came” and “The Lottery” that people in the village or different groups of people were too afraid of standing up for Tessie, or the Socialists, Trade Unionists, or the Jews.

As Natalie Babbitt said, “ Don't live in fear… Only the unlived life. You don't have to live forever; You just have to live” ( Tuck Everlasting).Shirley Jackson wrote a somewhat controversial story “ The Lottery”, written by Shirley Jackson. This story is about a town's yearly Lottery that only one lucky person gets to win. The Author uses dialogue and setting to convey the mood, which is Don’t live in fear.

In her work “ The Lottery”, Shirley Jackson illustrates the idea that society is reluctant to reject out dated traditions. To illustrate the theme of this story Mr. Summers “spoke frequently to the villagers about making a new box, but no one liked to upset…tradition. ”(Jackson 1) This shows how the community as a whole is accustomed to the sacrifices and their current ways that they will not even accept a new box. In addition, Old Man Warner spoke about how crazy it would be to eradicate the lottery, saying that the other towns are a “pack of crazy fools” to do so (4).

In Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” the story conducts a “lottery” that involves the families of the town to go into a drawing. Once the drawing is done, the winner of the lottery is used as a sacrifice in the town and is pelted by stones thrown from the community, including children. Furthermore, the basis of “The Lottery” has to do with psychological problems and influence. Psychoanalysis is built upon Sigmund Freud’s theories of psychology, which asserts that the human mind is affected by their “unconscious that is driven by their desires and fears” (Brizee). Analyzing the concept of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” through a psychoanalytic lens convey how society reflects on the consciousness, how the denial of the mind can avoid the

In both stories, the innocent characters were fighting death at the hands of someone who found the idea of killing another human being to be a game. In “The Lottery” the game of death consumed an innocent life solely because a few individuals founded a tradition; and in “The Most Dangerous Game” the game of death consumed an innocent life solely because one person thought it was merely entertaining. Both authors portrayed the antagonist as friendly, warm and welcoming. In the Lottery, the antagonists were the families whom participated in the drawing of a name that lead to the stoning of another family member (which may or may not be their own family member). In “The Most Dangerous Game” the antagonist was a well-off general who opened his luxurious home to guests who have gone astray from their original destination. Death is the main theme of both short stories and both authors portrayed this dark and dreary idea as a game the characters are playing.

Since reading The Lottery by Shirely Jackson, I’ve been thinking more about culture, traditions, and perspective. Not just that, but how it can sometimes take adopting an unbiased, non judgmental, or outside perspective in order to see things for what they really are. The way that the narrator in this story adopts such a position allows for a clearer view of the events of the story.

In her short story, “The Lottery”, Sheila Jackson invites us into the square of a small village on a warm summer day (247). It is not just any day. It is the 27th of June; an annually anticipated day for this community (Jackson, 247). The scene is described to depict a pre-technology era, most likely resembling an early American town. They have postal service, a school, and a bank, but no mention of devices, such as telephones, or modern transportation is made. (Jackson, 247). It is possible that the author wanted to represent the very basic elements in our humanity when choosing the setting.

Every society in the modern world has some form of tradition that has been passed down from generation to generation, and no matter what the custom is, people will continue to follow it due to the human nature to resist change. Even if there is an urge for change, it will likely be suppressed and seen as an act of rebellion as most people follow tradition simply because “that’s just how it is”, and never seem to question why. Suzanne Collin’s novel The Hunger Games and Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” best illustrate this point by showing how a violent annual tradition affects a society and its innocent people. The Hunger Games has such uncanny similarities to “The Lottery” that it almost seems as if Collins used Jackson’s story as a source of inspiration for her novel. Both The Hunger Games and “The Lottery” are extremely similar thematically in the sense that sheepishly following tradition can often be detrimental to society because it can lead to adverse consequences such as death, ignorance, and a society with no desire to change.

Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, is a terrifying, tension filled masterpiece of an ancient human practice set present day America, 1948. Jackson’s dark, short story is about a rural farming village on the east coast, who, like other villages around them, conduct a yearly “lottery.” It begins in the town square in the month of June, where the schoolchildren are gathering stones while awaiting the arrival of their respective families. When the lottery is formally started, roll call is initiated followed by that particular person walking up to the “black box” and removing a slip of paper without looking at it. Once the names of all the villagers are called, everyone looks at their own slips of paper, even the woman and children. The villager with the black circle is the winner of that year’s lottery and as such, is chosen to die by stoning from the other villagers. It is important to note that The Lottery is written just after World War II, in the years following the holocaust. Jackson moves to reconstruct how Germans, at the time, were able to turn a blind eye and accept a barbaric act of purging their neighbors as a societal norm. The reaction to this short story made Shirley Jackson famous; she set off emotional waves coast to coast of hatred and denial in regards to the meaning of the text. Through a Marxism analysis, it is easier to understand how a society as a whole accepts an institutionalized ritual as a part of everyday life.