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The Lottery Jackson

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The lottery by Shirley Jackson is a short story about a small town that has a yearly ritual that involves a “lottery”. Every year on June 27th the lottery takes place; all the villagers gather around the town square on that day while gathering stones and rocks. Once everyone has gotten together Mr. summers proceeds with presenting the lottery. He has a black box where he mixes up slips of papers and throws them inside, the rules are that he’ll read names and the family heads come up and draw a piece of paper. As Mr. Summers gets through all the names everyone who has a slip of paper is now allowed to open it and see if they have gotten the one with the black dot. Bill Hutcherson is the one who “got it” and so his wife, Tessie Hutcherson gets …show more content…

Everyone one in the family draws a piece of paper and Tessier Hutcherson has gotten the one with the black dot. Once she opens the paper and everyone knows it’s her Mr. Summers instructs everyone to “hurry up” and the villagers grab stones and start throwing them at her. Tessie says “it isn’t fair, it isn’t right” a then gets hit in the head with a stone. Shirley Jackson starts off the story by explaining the setting, which is an early summer morning and is the last day of school for the children. She explains children running around, women gossiping and men going about their day. Shirley Jackson sets up the mood as something very positive but the setting foreshadows the exact opposite. The story ends with Tessie’s death which was thrown upon her by the outcome of the lottery and the hands of the people who she surrounds herself with every day, the villagers, her friends and family. The lack of mercy in this story is projected right when Old Man Warner, the town elder shuts down the …show more content…

He says this because he has the viewpoint where sticking with what you know is the most just way to behave. Old man warner is very comfortable with the lottery and the fact that the town has been doing it for years, he stands by this tradition and believes that it should be a continuous thing. Getting rid of the lottery does not exist in his world and so any new ideas or anything outside the tradition was shut down. A tradition in today’s society that is blindly followed is thanksgiving, thanksgiving is celebrated within many households across Canada and America. Essentially It is a day that people celebrate eating a big meal around the dinner table with their loved ones. Unfortunately, this day was the start of a 500-year long history of genocide of the aboriginal tribes who rightfully inhabited north, central and south America for thousands of years. Christopher Columbus and his crew started pillaging the land and taking everything from the aboriginals, taking away what is theirs and forever changing their life. Columbus invaded this land and took over everything with his ship crew. they turned it into a consistent cycle of rape, slavery and slaughter. They picked up a nation and destroyed it, treating it with the outmost of disrespect, exploitation of their resources, the colonization and destruction of their way of life. The history textbooks in schools don’t have the hard

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