Research Paper - Blindness

Leonardo da Silva        

ENGL – 310

Dr. Debrot

September 16, 2014

Tradition can be described, according to the Oxford Dictionary, as “the transmission of customs or beliefs from generation to generation, or the fact of being passed on in this way”. In “The Lottery”, a story written by an American author named Shirley Jackson, the narrator tells a story about a lottery that takes place in a small town of about 300 people. In a sunny day, all the residents of the town gather together in the square to follow this tradition. The lottery consists of everyone drawing a slip of paper that is inside a black box, and then after everyone get a paper, the person who gets the split of paper with a black dot on it stays in the middle of a circle and everyone else throw stones at this person leading him or her to death.  Traditions may sometimes be harmful and lead to an unexpected and painful ending for some people. Therefore, even being aware of the ending that the tradition might cause to some of them, why don’t they think about ending the lottery? Even though the townspeople have forgotten the true purpose of the lottery, they never think about ending it because they have been blinded by tradition.

 The people of that small town seem that they were not aware of the consequences that the lottery would bring to them. In the beginning of the Jackson’s story, it possible to notice that the villagers are acting as nothing is going on, or even worse, they are taking that day as it was a normal one, not taking into consideration what would happen after the lottery ends.  

Soon the men began to gather, surveying their own children, speaking of planting and rain, tractors and taxes. They stood together, away from the pile of stones in the corner, and their jokes were quiet and they smiled rather than laughed. The women, wearing faded house dresses and sweaters, came shortly after their menfolk. They greeted one another and exchange bits of gossip as they went to join their husbands. (p. 291-292)

Another fact of the story that shows the readers how blind the villagers were blind in relation to the tradition is when the author talks about the situation of the box used in the lottery.

Mr. Summers spoke frequently to the villagers about making a 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. (p. 292-293)