The Lottery

Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” is set in a small town with a population being around 300 people, in this town everyone seems to be familiar and kind towards each other. Each year there is a lottery in this town which is a yearly tradition and everyone is there to participate in it. As all the villagers’ were gathered together, Mr. Summers had finally arrived with the black box to begin the lottery. The box had folded slips of paper inside of it and one of those papers had a black dot on it and to win the lottery you would have to pick that certain paper. The winner of the lottery this year was Tessie Hutchinson and out of nowhere all the adults and innocent children had ganged up on Mrs. Hutchinson and started to throw stones at her until her death. The author’s tone is what made this short story’s ending so unanticipated and the village had suddenly turned from being quiet and peaceful to completely violent and gruesome. The way everyone including her family had turned on Tessie Hutchinson just goes to show how inconsiderate society can get about what they are doing because a non-guilty person had won a vicious lottery and it is a tradition to throw stones at the winner until they have been beaten to death. The author portrays two main themes in the short story which are tradition and betrayal.

One of Shirley Jackson’s main theme in “The Lottery” is tradition and she carries this theme in her writing from start to finish. “The people had done it so many times... they only half listened to the directions” presents that everyone has played the lottery so many times that they do not have to pay attention to the directions anymore and already know what to do. Also, the author does not mention anything about the way the villagers feel about the inhumanity of this tradition and it goes to show that taking someones life because they had picked out the wrong slip of paper is just another yearly ritual for the villagers. The villagers are so attached and faithful to this tradition that