Analysis of Shirley Jackson's the Lottery

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Anthony E. English 8 March 2012 A Plot Analysis on Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” Most great stories begin with a basic pattern of events such as a situation, conflict, climax, suspense, and conclusion. Shirley Jackson does an outstanding job using these events in her short-story hit “The Lottery”. Jackson captivates the audience by making her readers conscious of the disorder, discrimination of gender, and injustice class that surrounds our society. Let’s take a deeper look into Jackson’s short-story and how the plot plays such a major role in the stories success. The story opens describing the setting as a beautiful summer day in a small town of no more than 300 people. Children are running and playing outside, and the villagers are beginning to gather around the town square as the town converges every year for an annual drawing of the lottery. Jackson is mum as to what the winning ticket’s prize will be leaving it to the reader to speculate what it could be throughout the whole story. This allows the scene to be set for future discoveries, thus revealing our initial situation. All of the towns’ villagers have gathered and the lottery has commenced. Mr. Summers begins by calling each head of household (man of the house) to come forward and draw a piece of paper from the towns’ old wooden black lottery box. The box has been used and mended for reuse since the founding days of the town lottery. After calling the men forward to draw slips, Mr. Summers has everyone open and reveal who has been chosen as the lottery winner. The lucky winner turns out to be Bill Hutchinson but his wife Tessie immediately begins disputing the fairness of the drawing with the town’s people. This seems to be untypical and strange of a person whose spouse has just won the lottery. Now the reader starts to get an idea that the prize may not be a large sum of money
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