The Lottery

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

The short story “The Lottery” was written in 1948 by Shirley Jackson. It was first published in a popular magazine, The New Yorker (Kirszner & Mandell 419). The story starts out on a pleasant summer day but has a much darker ending. This instantly caused mass confusion and anger by most of the magazine's readers. Some readers even canceled their subscription to the magazine. Although the readers demanded answers, Jackson refused to give any explanation of the story. The best explanation was from

2.2 The Lottery The main theme of the story expresses the notion of human scapegoat which has a devastating effect due to the crowd psychology that is presented in the story. The scenic setting stated in the beginning of the story highly opposes with the horrific violence that the story comes to. It mentions it being a beautiful summer day with flowers "blossoming profusely" and the grass "richly green” ,giving the reader to predict that the story is going to end just as well as the beginning

In “The Lottery” there was were different kinds of conflicts that were shown throughout the story. All these types of conflict help create different moods and themes in stories. They give the reader a sense of excitement or it can even scare them depending on what is going on. In this story it all started off like it if was a beautiful peaceful town with people enjoying an event in the town square. Until all the problems started occurring and you started looking at the characters moods did you start

followed simply because they have always been done. This phenomenon is also the case in “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. The short story is about people in a community who stone someone to death yearly since it is an ancient tradition. Even though they hate the tradition, they are afraid of what will happen if they change it. The oldest man even says that their entire world will change if they do not have a lottery. While reading the beginning of the story, however, the reader has no idea about what is

foreshadows the horrific ending to the story, The Lottery, by dropping clues about how the stones play an important part of the story. On the first page of the story, Jackson states, “Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones” (Jackson 1). From this quote, the author tells the reader that a young boy, Bobby Martin, had already got paraphernalia for the lottery. Bobby crammed stones into his pockets because

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 The Lottery, the narrator speaks to us in a non participant and objective manner. We hear and see events unfold

The story takes place in a village on June 27 where “The Lottery” began. Citizens of the village started gathering around a box, filled with slips of paper. Already in the second paragraph of the story, it hinted, “Bobby Martin already stuffed his pockets full of stones”, the action starts from the beginning as to what are they going to do with those stones. The story describes how everyone is acting normal and how they are just talking and laughing like they usually do. I think that even though

As said by John P. Kotter," tradition is a very powerful force." In Shirley Jackson's chilling story "The Lottery", a town celebrates a special tradition of stoning people to death happens every year. The short story provides the reader the reality of blind faith, tradition, and their consequences. Jackson perfectly depicts a possible event that may occur from blindly following tradition without evaluating the purpose or usefulness of the tradition in the first place. Her use of plot that creates

Shirley Jackson’s, “The Lottery”, clearly expresses her feelings concerning traditional rituals through her story. It opens the eyes of readers to properly classify and question some of today’s traditions as cruel, and allows room to foretell the outcome of these unusual traditions. “The Lottery” is a short story that records the annual sacrifice ceremony of a fictional small town. It is a detailed narrative of the selection of the person to be sacrificed, a