The Lottery, By Shirley Jackson

Andrew Lansley once said “Peer pressure and social norms are powerful influences on behavior, and they are classic excuses.” Most people tend to follow cultural customs because they have grown with them or it has been forced onto them with factors such as parents or their environment. However, is it always right to follow these customs even if they are in fact considered wrong? Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” is a short story about the cultural norms of a small community and its annual lottery ritual; a stoning. Jackson overthrows the story by making the lottery a corrupt occurrence rather than a victory. The reader would probably think that the “winner” of the lottery would be benefited but in this case the victory was not so delightful. In her short story “The Lottery” Jackson seemingly uses ordinary details about the setting and the townspeople to characterize her theme that although society claims to be civilized, and may appear so, it is inherently barbaric.

What is the difference between superstitions and traditions? «The lottery» by Shirley Jackson provides a good example how superstitions of people from a tiny town affect on those traditions. This story shows dark side of Humanity. Whole community entrusts their life with a small black box. The allegory can confuse you, because the main purpose of the «lottery» is kill one of the citizens for a strange false belief. To my mind, the author tried to explain why new generation sometimes shouldn’t continue the weird and cruel traditions.

Jackson starts the story with introducing the town and people to the readers. At the beginning of the story, it doesn’t seem like anyone is going to be killed. All the villagers are calm and relaxed. Kids just got out of school; boys are gathering stones, while girls are stalking them with their eyes and talking about them. Men are talking about their jobs and smiling at each other’s jokes, and Women are gossiping. As the readers get closer and closer to the end of the story, they realize that this Lottery is very different from a normal lottery game. As much as these people look calm and relaxed on a beautiful sunny day, they are cruel, violent, harmful, and socially ill. These villagers are blindly following a tradition, which makes them to kill each other in one of the most violent ways. They are aware of their

In Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery,” a small village is preparing for an annual drawing, a tradition carried out for generations. During this ritual, the head of each household draws a blank piece of paper out of a black box. One piece of paper is marked with a single black dot and if chosen, the outcome is having the winner’s entire household draw out of the box. Whoever chooses the black dot out of the household is stoned to death by the entire village. In this instance, a husband wins to which his wife protests, and then she is the ultimate victim who is sacrificed. This story includes many literary elements like foreshadowing, warning of a future event, symbolism, symbols used in the story to represent ideas,and irony, when the contrary to what is expected to happen, occurs. Jackson uses foreshadowing, symbolism, and irony to prove the theme that it is foolish and barbaric to blindly follow tradition.

“The Lottery” was written in 1948 by Shirley Jackson. Mrs. Jackson, born in 1916, was known for her tales of horror and supernatural novels. She and her literary critic husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman lived in a little town called Bennington, Vermont. Mrs. Jackson was not accepted by the town. Her novels, especially “The Lottery”, revealed the dark side of human nature. Stephen King honored Shirley Jackson by dedicating his book Firestarter to her.

b. Background In the short story “The Lottery,” the inhabitants of a village participate in a lottery, which is essentially a tradition for them. However, the villagers are oblivious to the true consequences and destructiveness of their death ritual. One June day each year, the lottery is conducted and the “winner” is violently stoned to death. The very same day, the villagers return home and carry on with their normal day-to-day functions.

In The Lottery, Shirley Jackson reveals that people follow traditions without knowing the reason or origin of the tradition. Religion and racism are two beliefs that people acquire from previous generations. Jackson’s purpose in writing The Lottery was to compel readers to think about why they follow their traditions. Most religious customs are not harmful, but the disturbing practice in the village draws the reader's attention. The theme that people follow traditions and beliefs of their ancestors without question can be explained through The Lottery’s setting, characters, and symbolisms.

“The Lottery”, an idiosyncrasy full of twisted hidden symbolisms and horror by Shirley Jackson. The symbolisms, the black box, the three legged stool and the stones used in the lottery, are a vivid reference to a sociological event where tradition outweighs moral rationalism. It’s a well written fictional illustration, yet fierce in its details and horror against a human agency where the long history of the tradition, The Lottery, morally crushes rationalism.

Two stories that correlate the best with each other are “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson and “Those Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula Le Guin. In “The Lottery” all the people of this one town get together in the middle of the square to pick someone for the lottery. Every household gets one piece of paper from a black box that has only one black spotted paper. If the paper has a black spot, that household is to put the black spot and however many more people are in that family into the box. Then, the family chooses. The family member with the black spot gets stoned to death by the towns’ people. Tessie Hutchinson was the one that was chosen in “The Lottery”. Similarly in, “Those Who Walk Away From Omelas” the entire town knows a young child is being kept in a basement with very low standards. The children of this town find out about the child when they are eight to twelve. Some of the young people decide that they cannot live in a place where this is going on, so they leave Omelas and never return. In these stories, the community uses a scapegoat to be used by the others to make horrific scenes.

Stonings have been around for centuries, it is something I heard about as a child in Sunday school, something I thought was done in the past and not today. Stonings are alive to this day mostly in the middle east. more often than not women are stoned more than men. Convictions in Iran are based on witness testimony, judge conviction or confession; friends, family, neighbors and any other volunteers may participate in the stoning of a victim. Stoning is a horrific way to die, sometimes taking up to two hours to kill the victim. In the story “The Lottery” author Shirley Jackson has the towns people of the story stone one of their own as a sacrifice while in the middle east people are stoned as a punishment for “crime” this act of capital punishment is barbaric and should be banned.

Conformity is not based mainly on containing and supporting a society, but also to dominate and control what is within. The control of repressed individuality benefits those at the top of a power structure. From early on, men were considered the breadwinners and women were to maintain households; whether due to a difference in physical, emotional, or mental state; this was an unquestioned hierarchy. Therefore, any women who pushed back were ultimately punished for threatening the system. In “The Lottery”, Shirley Jackson uses literary devices of symbolism, irony, and characterization to reveal the danger of blind obedience, and implanting the thought of resistance for women. To an extent, conformity is necessary in reality; time has shown that laws, rules, and regulations that are innately bad can serve as the catalyst for rebellion, as recorded for the French Revolution, Vietnam War, and Czarist Russia. Conformity lays the groundwork for good laws to be constructed, and until that time, men are able to abuse and utilized the current laws for their own superior gain. One of the biggest “rebellions” is backed purely by feminism, where women are repressed by men. Unfortunately, in the past not many women knew their true value, and were prematurely silenced; however, Jackson is revealing the reality of the restraints.

Today’s American Literature tends to put more of a realistic tone to writing than in previous time periods. Writers point out what society as a whole likes to pretend does not exist, and were often frowned upon for doing so. In Shirley Jacksons “The Lottery” she does exactly that by portraying themes like the inhumanity of violence and the tendency people have to follow traditions even when they do not agree with them. In a short biography about Jackson it says “The story was met with an avalanche of feedback, including hate mail and cancelled subscriptions. Many folks interpreted the story as an attack on the values of small towns America” (“The Shirley Jackson Page at American Literature”). This negative reaction is how most people

The story of “The Lottery” is a dark tale that gives the reader a window into a community blighted by an tradition propagated by ignorance; sending a message that reverberates with many events, ideas, and observations throughout the annals of time. Written by the great Shirley Jackson, this fable exemplifies how delusion and illogical thinking led to the terrifying and morose ending of Tessie Hutchinson's existence. Shirley Jackson was well known in her lifetime, but not necessarily as the literary master she is hailed as today. Jackson had great interest in the culture of witchcraft, and deeply incorporated this knowledge into one of her first short stories: “The Lottery.” While this influence greatly improved the haunted tone of the

In the short story “The Lottery”, written by Shirley Jackson, the dangers of traditions, and the rituals that are associated with it, come to light as the reader learns of a small town and the events that its people partake in. While one may think of traditions as having a turkey on Thanksgiving or putting cookies out for Santa, traditions in this town take on a darker side where their most valued tradition is one of human sacrifice in hopes of having a good harvest season. Throughout the story the reader goes through an emotional roller coaster when they first believe that someone is about to win a lottery, that we believe will be one of luxury and money, only to find out the true winnings of the lottery is an overabundance of stones being thrown at one’s head intended to cause their death. While the tradition keeps small towns and families closer and helps to preserve one’s culture some people in the village and outside believe that this tradition is negative and dangerous and move towards ending the ritualistic sacrifice.

The famous civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. once said: “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people,” capturing the main message of the short story “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson, perfectly, because of the themes of peer pressure and tradition present throughout the story. In this story, the people of a small village gather for their annual tradition, a lottery, in which one person is picked at random out of a box containing each of the villagers’ names. The village, which is not specifically named, seems like any other historic village at first, with the women gossiping, the men talking, and the children playing, but soon takes a sinister turn when it