Research Paper on Shirley Jackson's “The Lottery”

“The less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it” (Twain). The Lottery begins during the summer. A small, seemingly normal, town is gathering to throw the annual “Lottery”. In the end, the townspeople—children included—gather around and stone the winner to death, simply because it was tradition. The story reveals how traditions can become outdated and ineffective. “I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives” (Jackson). As humans develop as a race, their practices should develop with them. Shirley Jackson develops the

In Shirley Jackson's story, “The Lottery”, she expresses her feelings on why the people of the village blindly follow certain parts of the inhumane tradition, while allowing others to be disregarded without question. For instance, a villager is selected at random to be stoned to death. This conveys the reader to understand some of the traditions were cruel, and allows them to foresee the result of the traditions that took place in the village. Shirley Jackson uses symbolism throughout her story to allow readers to be aware of the pointless nature of humanity in regard to the tradition. Three concepts behind “The Lottery” are family relationships, blind adherence, and rules of the tradition.

The diffusion of responsibility led to a mass bystander apathy in which, “...[the villagers] discarded their own sense of responsibility, deceiving themselves into believing that other[s]...who allowed the misconduct knew better than they did about what was right” (Gandossy). They believed in their hearts that their tradition would lead to the prosperity of their lovelihoods and for that of their families. They would be “benefiting from the current way of doing things” (Gandossy).Also no authoritative figure like Mr. Summers or Mr. Graves spoke out against the lottery. As Robert Gandossy and Jeffrey Sonnenfeld state in their journal, ‘I see nothing, I hear nothing: Culture, Corruption, and Apathy,’ “It demonstrated the willingness of the adults to go to almost any extreme if they believed they were being directed or encouraged by a legitimate authority.” Unfortunately the villagers do not realize that they would be better off without the lottery. They follow a tradition whose parts have been long forgotten, and still carry out the most violent end result in the most barbaric way, death by stones. The people are very self-centered seeing as how they are so quick to turn on friends and family. Like Jay Moore states in ‘Behaviorism’, “A culture thrives when it teaches its members to be concerned about the welfare and ultimate survival of the

«The lottery» is an allegory which was written by Shirley Jackson in 1948. In it, she used an irony to show how inane could be some traditions and people who essentially follow them. The lottery - is the ritual when all people from the small village crowd together and Mr. Summers, who enjoys devoting civic activities, organizes this event. He and his assistant make a small piece of paper and one of these has a black dot. They put it into the shabby black box, after Mr. Summers call head of household to determine who will «win» the lottery. But the winner should not be happy, because all other citizens will stone the winner to death. People do it annually, because they afraid that the harvest could be poor. Everyone must participate, regardless of gender and age. This short story contains a lot of different characters to explain how belief in something abnormal of previous generations can strongly affect traditions and consider morality.

The village seems rather uncivilized and immoral in contrast to the modern, Western world. Their ritual stoning of an innocent person shocks the reader and immediately changes our perspective on the village. Jackson doesn’t clarify the purpose of the lottery, but Old Man Warner mentions that there “‘[u]sed to be a saying about “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon”’” (Jackson 4). From this saying, we can deduce that the villagers once believed that a

As the plot of the stories unfolds, the greater influence of violent tensions become evident. In The Lottery, people follow the tradition despite its cruelty and absurdity. Although the ritual of the lottery is brutal, the dwellers of the village do not seem to see how barbaric it is because “there’s always been a lottery” (Jackson, 1982, p. 118). Nevertheless, the tensions grow when the lottery begin and every citizen is awaiting for its end. The climatic moment of the story grows when the reader discovers that Tess

Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery is set in a small village who relies deeply on their crops. This story is about a sacrifice that takes place every year in which the heads of households draw for their families in order to see who “wins” and saves the town. The readers grow close to a character named Tessie who decides to speak her mind when it’s too late. In the end, the townsfolk realise that what comes around goes around.

Tradition is a large part of life today, but decades ago it was almost a way of life and if it was not followed there were stiff consequences. The story is misleading by the title because of the normal thought of a lottery is something positive or a giveaway. The story is quite the opposite of the common thought. The main point that Jackson shows in “The Lottery” is that people can be involved with such a violent act and think nothing of it. In the story all the people are happy, “they stood together, away from the pile of stones in the corner, and their jokes were quiet and they smiled rather than laughed.”(Jackson 124). The tradition the village seams at first to be a happy scene, but later learn that it is a terrible event that is a

"It isn't fair, it isn't right, Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her" (Jackson). Shirley Jackson's “The Lottery” is brimming with illustrations of how thoughtless repetition dilutes foundations that were once rock solid. The traditions of the village in the story lead to the stoning to death of one of the residents on a yearly basis. The people were not so clear as to how, when, or why this took place every year; however, this did not stop them from continuing with an encore. The limited view they had on life and of growth was the road block that prevented any major change. Traditions can overcome society's better judgement.

The characters of the story blindly follow the traditions of the lottery, allowing murder to be apart of their society. The villagers are not being forced to keep the ritual alive, but they continue it anyway out of personal interest. Old Man Warner is so ecstatic towards the lottery that he believes if the tradition is lost, the people of the village

In "The Lottery" Shirley Jackson presents us with a shocking story guaranteed to outrage the reader. The author brings together the residents of a small village as they are gathered for an annual event referred to as the lottery. The families of the village are represented by their names on small pieces of paper, which are placed in a black box. The appointed townsperson oversees the drawing to determine who pulls the slip of paper that "wins" the drawing. The characters seem ordinary enough, and they appear to be pleasant mild people participating in an innocuous activity. There is a huge shock when the story turns violent. The peaceful village people are choosing which person in their community they are going to

Once upon a time there was a little village. In this village three hundred people happily farmed and played and went about their business. The children went to school while the men cut wood or farmed, and the women cooked and cleaned. Every summer in June each of villagers took part in the traditional lottery drawing and one villager was picked for the prize – a stoning. In 1948, Shirley Jackson published this short story known as “The Lottery,” in The New York Times. The story’s plot shocked readers all over America as they learned of the horror happening in such a quaint town. Jackson purposely set this tragic event in this innocent setting to emphasize humanity’s cruelty. Using her appalling short story, The Lottery,

Although some of the villagers seemed to be frightened by the lottery, they did not do anything about it. The majority of them were convinced that the lottery was imperative to keep them sane. For years, their forefathers had taught them about this ritual. Since they were trained to kill as children, the villagers had no issue with continuing the tradition. If they were to quit the lottery, they would lose a significant part of their

The above excerpt demonstrates "that one function of the lottery is to change the relationship between community and victim" (Magill 1673). At one instant all of the villagers are equal, but after the person is chosen to die, the rest of the village are predators hunting their prey. This change in feelings portrays a barbaric instinct towards the loser.

“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 growing” (Jackson, 2). The town never had an overpopulation issue, there was never a good enough reason to continue the lottery and even less start it for that matter. The social hierarchy of the town did not allow the people to have a voice and that made them feel intimidated. The people were almost programed and expected to accept and carry this unfair tradition; not because of the meaning of it but because they were scared to ask to let it go in results of things getting worse.