Comparison Of Pride In The Necklace And The Lottery

1389 Words6 Pages
Bear Grylls once said “A man's pride can be his downfall, and he needs to learn when to turn to others for support and guidance". In The Lottery, the villagers have a type of lottery that results in the death of a villager every time this lottery is held, and the villagers are too proud of this tradition to actually cease these meaningless deaths. Moreover, in The Necklace, the main character, Madame Mathilde, borrows what she thinks is a very expensive necklace from her friend and Mathilde’s vanity doesn’t allow her to actually admit that she loses it and she ends up wasting a decade of her life paying off debts. These two short stories support Grylls’ words by showing how pride or vanity has damaging effects for the characters in the stories, In The Lottery by Shirley Jackson and The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant, the lottery box and the pearl necklace are symbols of human pride or vanity and show the inevitable downfall that comes…show more content…
Danielle Schaub agrees that “the villagers' fear of changing either the course of the lottery or the ritualistic objects discloses to what extent they are caught in the web of tradition” (Schaub 82). The villagers’ treatment of the box represents their thinking on the subject of the lottery as a whole: they're a bit terrified by both the box and the lottery, but they're also too frightened (and, perhaps even fascinated), to drop either one. Like the lottery as a whole, the black box has no functionality except during this two hours every June: "It had spent one year in Mr. Graves's barn and another year underfoot in the post office and sometimes it was set on a shelf in the Martin grocery and left there" (Jackson 244). The purpose of the box, like the lottery itself, has become obscure with the passage of time. It is well worn, but the villagers are reluctant to let it go, again, like the lottery

More about Comparison Of Pride In The Necklace And The Lottery

Open Document