In her stories "The Lottery" Shirley Jackson teaches the themes in many criteria. Here, I would like to point out a curious crux in Shirley Jackson's treatment of the theme of "a community who follows and implement tradition blindly with a strong feeling of conservativeness".

Possibly the most depressing thing about "The Lottery" is how early Shirley Jackson represents this blindness as beginning. Even the village children have been socialized into the ideology that victimizes Mrs. Hutchinson. When they are introduced in the second paragraph of the story, they are anxious that summer has let them out of school: "school was recently over for the summer, and feeling of liberty sat uneasily on most of them : they tended to gather together quietly for a while before they broke into boisterous play, and their talk was still of the classroom and the teacher, of books and reprimands. Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys s

The black box in paragraph 5 that mentioned by Shirley Jackson also is one of the evidence to support the theme. This is shown by phrase "Mr. Summers spoke frequently to the villagers about making the new box, but no one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box. There was 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 here.

The closer we look at their behavior, the more we realize that the children learn it from their parents, whom they imitate in their play. In order to facilitate her reader's grasp of this point, Shirley Jackson has included at least one genuinely innocent child in the story - Davy Hutchinson. When he has to choose his lottery ticket, the adults help him while he looks at them "wonderingly". And when Mrs. Hutchinson is finally to be stoned "someone" has to give Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles to stone his mother. This had made them uncivilized and forgot about humanity. To approve this, Shirley Jackson had been stated in "The children had stones already. And someone gave Little Davy Hutchinson few pebbles.

Hence, Shirley Jackson did highlighted about efforts by few villagers to stop the tradition, however the idea was rejected by the others.

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Approximate Word count = 997
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)