The Lottery Theme Essay

It was the morning of June 27th, ten years after Tessie Hutchinson was stoned to death. So much had happened during this decade after her death. Horace Dunbar was stoned last year, and Mrs. Graves the year before. The village now consisted of about 500 citizens, and with the village growing every year the lottery became more and more necessary for the town to prosper. But still people doubted the value of the lottery and tried to preclude it. Back when the year Tessie was stoned, the Adams were talking about how other towns were giving up the lottery. Every year there were a larger amount of people opposing the lottery.

To actually have a tradition in place, it has to be followed and duplicated with very few or no change. For centuries, non-essential traditions and acts have been practiced all for the reward of approval from a group or community as a whole. Even if the tradition may be wrong and distasteful, only the people being directly affected by it will speak against it. Deadly and harsh practices such as hazing and stoning have been followed for the induction into the sororities, fraternities or society, yet does not serve a real purpose for acceptance. In Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” she reveals and emphasizes, through imagery and plot, that people of today and in previous eras conform to unnecessary, evil, and fake traditions because of a thirsty

Although two different stories, with multiple differences in conflict and setting, “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson and “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell bear multiple similarities as well. Both stories demonstrate how humans are portrayed as evil vs. good. Each story depicts a protagonist exhibiting conflict with another human or humans. One ends on a dark gloomy path for the protagonist while the other results in a victory for the protagonist.

Lotteries weren’t always about millions of dollars. A popular author of short stories, Shirley Jackson brought light to this in her story “The Lottery”. As a reader I learn, the lottery is a ritual where a citizen of the town is chosen at random and abuse. This not only shows how society negatively influences people blindly, but at random as well. Jackson wrote this story to inform people of the way we live, and how society can change very fast without warning. By illustrating how the town turned on Tessie after she drew the wrong slip of paper, she gave a Segway to the way people think and how things are not

In Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”, the small village, at first, seems to be lovely, full of tradition, with the townspeople fulfilling their civic duties, but instead this story is bursting with contrast. The expectations that the reader has are increasingly altered. The title of this short story raises hope, for in our society the term “lottery” typically is associated with winning money or other perceived “good” things. Most people associate winning a lottery with luck, yet Jackson twists this notion around and the luck in this village is with each of the losers.

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.

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.

            Furthermore, this lottery does not arouse the optimistic personalities that lotteries are known for, but rather conveys the apprehensive side of everyone in town and how serious it is to them.  When Mr. Summers cites, "Well now...guess we better get started, get this over with, so we can get back to work," it sounds like this drawing is not going to be as long and as serious, according to his light tone (p.424).  But in response to Mr. Summers, Old Man Warner says, "Bad enough to see young Joe Summers up there joking with everybody" (p.425).  This indicates that this drawing will be no

Shirley Jackson takes great care in creating a setting for the story, The Lottery. She gives the reader a sense of comfort and stability from the very beginning. It begins, "clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green." The setting throughout The Lottery creates a sense of peacefulness and tranquility, while portraying a typical town on a normal summer day.

One of the literary devices used in both “The Lottery” and “The Possibility of Evil” was irony. In “The Lottery” the woman, Mrs. Hutchinson, who ends up getting stoned to death is the one who happens to be running late “Mrs. Hutchinson came hurriedly along the path the the square, her sweater thrown over her shoulders, and slid into place in the back of the back of the crowd.” (Jackson, P. 9) This is situational irony because of course the woman who comes late and is acting so casual about the whole Lottery is going to be the woman that gets stoned to death. Another piece of

Over the years many critics have wrote articles on Shirley Jackson's numerous works. Many critics had much to say about Jackson's most famous short story, "The Lottery". Her insights and observations about man and society are disturbing; and in the case of "The Lottery," they are shocking. "The themes themselves are not new, evil cloaked in seeming good, prejudice and hypocrisy, loneliness and frustration, psychological studies of minds that have slipped the bonds of reality" (Friedman). Literary critic, Elizabeth Janeway wrote that, " 'The Lottery' makes its effect without having to state a moral about humanity's need to deflect the knowledge of its own death on a victim. That uneasy consciousness is

The Lottery point of view is third person (objective). These means the narrator is not a character in the story. Is telling us the characters thoughts and feelings. Also, the narrator shows the process of how is getting perform the lottery.

I do believe that an unsetteling ritual like the one told in The Lottery could happen in America today. This story insinuated that the ritual was done for two possible reasons. The first reason being to lessen the crime rate in their village, "Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example....eventually made a great pile of stones in one corner of the square and guarded it against the raids of the other boys". The second reason being to lessen their population, " Chips of wood, Mr. Summers had argued. had been all very well when the village was tiny, but now that the population was more than three hundred and likely to keep on growing, it was necessary to use something that would fit more easily into he black box". Both of these experiences are problems America has been trying to fix as of recently.

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.

Old Man Warner is a man who has lived through more than seventy lottery drawings, and has the traditions of the village deep within his roots. Old Man Warner gets word that in a northern village they are considering to stop the lottery tradition, and he just says that they are crazy (Jackson ). From his reaction to the statement made by Mr. Adams, we can tell that he does not want there to be change because the tradition is imbedded in his system. What others may see as brutal or heinous, he sees as mandatory and obligatory. The men in the village have the ultimate say in what goes on, and when changes need to be made.