The LotteryEssay Preview: The LotteryReport this essayThe LotteryBeing apart of a group can be the most fulfilling aspect of a person’s life. One can enjoy being surrounded by community and traditions to which they are accustomed. When one is apart of a community, he or she is obligated, most times, to participate in whatever rituals or ceremonies that the community is involved in. If one chooses not to participate in the ritual or ceremony, one might be shunned by the group and made an outcast. Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery,” the village participates in an annual lottery to determine which one of the villagers will be sacrificed in order for their crops to prosper the following year. On June 27th each year, the villagers gather and draw papers from an old box. The family that draws the paper with the black dot must then draw again. The family member that pulls the black dot is then stoned to death. Even though the ceremony ends in apparent tragedy, the villagers have no problem blindly carrying out their tradition because they are ignorant to its lack of necessity and cruelty.
The lottery had been happening in this village, and the villages surrounding it, since it was founded. Jackson mentions that “the black box…had been put into use even before Old Man Warner, the oldest man in town, was born”(351). Not one of the villagers knows when the lottery officially started, nor do they know the actual rituals that surrounded the lottery when it was created. Jackson, through her character Old Man Warner, alludes to the longevity and importance of the lottery. Warner says, “There’s always been a lottery.” It doesn’t seem that the lottery’s history gives any indication of the reason it is carried out each year. Even after completing the story the reader is given no information about the purpose of the annual event. Even though no one in the story could definitely say when the lottery had begun, the tradition had stuck with the villagers for many years.
Tradition is defined by the Merriam-Webster online dictionary as “a belief or story or a body of beliefs or stories relating to the past that are commonly accepted as historical though not verifiable.” The tradition in Jackson’s “The Lottery” is the choosing of slips of paper to determine who would be stoned. Many traditions include a rituals and ceremonies and “The Lottery” is no different. The author mentions that “much of the ritual had been forgotten or discarded,” (351). From this statement, one can assume that the actual tradition of the lottery is not what sustained it for so long. The simplest part of the lottery, the black box, is also a clue that the tradition means almost nothing to the townspeople. The black box is not the original box that was used at the start of the lottery, even though Jackson tells us that there is “a story that the present box had been made with some pieces of the box that had preceded it, the one that had been constructed when the first people settled down to make a village” (351). The townspeople are ignorant of the history and clueless as to the tradition of the lottery. Their ignorance seems to hail from their comfort with their place in the community and their unwillingness to challenge the system.
Even though it is not explicitly stated in the story, the reader definitely picks up on the hierarchy of the small village. Of the three hundred residents, there are two that stand out as the leaders, Mr. Summers, the man who owned the coal business in the village, and Mr. Graves, the postmaster. Jackson says “the lottery was conducted by Mr. Summers, who had time and energy to devote to civic activities” (350). One would think that this is because the people of the village were more occupied with working and being hardworking citizens in order to not be chosen for the lottery. The village is male-dominated. This is shown in the beginning of the short story when Jackson mentions that “the women, wearing faded house dresses and sweaters, came shortly behind their menfolk” (350). As heads of households, the men are the ones who had to choose
The Village
After the construction of the town, the two main characters have a difficult time getting along, most clearly when Jake’s mother tells him that she is staying in a nearby house and that everything will be okay. She describes that people will have to go to each other’s houses to talk about a recent visit they made. In all this time, they find themselves outmatched in many respects, although both of the characters have strong emotions, with only one in particular who is more passionate than the one at hand in the picture.
The Little Village
To the point where Jake finally has to deal with his father, his mother, and the other villagers, he finally gets a chance to talk, though he just doesn’t seem to get it very well. In fact, the whole story is about him having an affair with a girl who had no idea he had a child. In my mind we are given the idea of a long talk that doesn’t go into specifics (we just have to know when that is), but the idea of what would be happening next, which is quite bizarre. As well as being an offhand comment, no one else had said a word about the affair until now, so it just goes downhill.
There are six villages in the novel. They all had to play on very different stereotypes. These are generally the towns, like it or not, where boys and girls played well together and where parents got a kick out of keeping a job (if not being physically clean would be more likely). These villages also tended to be pretty barren, though, and because of that their towns could be far from what the story might have been about. In those villages there are still people who have gone to each other’s houses to talk about the future, and they might still be doing that in their own homes because they don’t like the thought (the towns of the later two stories are very sad; they always have children who are going to have parents who are going to spend the whole summer with their kids in school, but also they do their own housework for a living or work. There are a lot of examples of that in the book, like Jake’s family’s apartment in the first place, where they both need to spend the whole night there sleeping after school, or in the future in school for the first time. The towns from the later stories also seem to have different themes, with the boys taking home the money while the girls make more and better crafts. The towns in each one of these stories are all very dark and pretty, not being in direct contrast to the rest. The villagers are clearly the ones in the towns, so any of the children in each of them gets to decide whether to go to camp or go to an amusement park, though those children are also allowed to have children.
The Village of the Little Village
In this village, the story turns to one that is very similar to the towns and where the villagers have a lot of choices. The Little Village is a small village in the early chapters and has no more than a handful of people present, including the housewife who lives