Looking at "The Lottery" From Different View Points
In Shirley Jackson's short story, "The Lottery", villagers gather together for the upcoming lottery. The lottery is an annual event, on June 27th, which everyone in the community participates. Mr. Summers, a well-known businessman, is in charge of the lottery, and Mr. Graves, the postmaster, assists as well. The lottery this year is not in any way unordinary. The children arrive first to the town square, and quickly gather stones. The women and men converse with each other like any other day. All is well in the community until Mr. Summers and Mr. Graves enter with the black box (Jackson 74). With its weathered paint and splintered wood the box looks as old as the lottery tradition even though it is not the original box. In fact the box isn't the only thing that has changed since the original lottery. Back when the lottery first started they used wood chips as tickets, but since the community has grown larger Mr. Summers has opted to use slips of paper (Jackson 75). Even with these slight changes nothing seems as controversial as the lottery its self. When talk of other communities discontinuing the lottery occurs, Mr. Warner, the oldest man in town, goes on to say, "Nothing but trouble in that. Pack of young fools (Ja
hem up. All but one family member opens their slip and doesn't get excited. This is Mrs. Hutchinson because she has drawn the black dot. Mrs. Hutchinson's screams of despair are ignored as her family, friends, and town's people quickly begin to stone her to death (Jackson 79). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ckson 77)." With this said the lottery keeps going as it does each year. Jackson, Shirley. The Lottery. Literature and the Writing Process. Elizabeth McMahan, Susan X Day, and Robert Funk. 5th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice, 1999. 74-79 "The Lottery" shows how much humans try and find a scapegoat and then how humans take out all of their built up anger and insecurities on the actually scapegoat. An example of this is when an accusation about a man's evil patriotism gets his innocent wife "stoned" to death by her neighbors (Brooks and Warren 251). The author didn't only focus on use of scapegoats in the story. The author also seemed to focus on how "kind and thoughtful" the neighbors try to act yet they are still able to stone their fellow town's person just because of the tradition behind the lottery its self. The reader has a hard time finding the point of the story because of its complexity of everyday life (Brooks and Warren 251). Finally, the author has done a very good job of making the reader shape his or her attitude so the reader will "take" the ending of the story a certain way. Everything in the story is made to make the reader feel that the actually lottery is "perfectly credible", but by the time the reader reaches the actual awful reality of it all he or she is in true shock. This also shows the
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1144
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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