Evil Disguised As Tradition In Shirley Jackson's The Lottery

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3 March 2015 Evil Disguised as Tradition “The Lottery” is a short story written by Shirley Jackson that tells the story of a town and its tradition of a yearly lottery. In this story, the townspeople come together once a year to pull slips from a box to see who will be stoned to death. The lottery is the main subject of this story and the rules of the lottery are simple. One person from every household (usually the man of the house) pulls a ticket from the traditional black box of slips. Whoever pulls the slip with a black dot, must draw again, only this time the only people that will draw from the black box with be the members of the household that pulled the slip with the black dot first. Whoever pulls the slip with the black dot on it…show more content…
An example of this is seen in the story when the author writes “Bobby and Harry Jones and Dickie Delacroix eventually made a great pile of stones in one corner of the square and guarded it against the raids of the other boys.” (Jackson 373). The setting does not quite fit the malevolent vibe that the author is trying to convey. Kids playing, gathering rocks; Mr. Summer making jokes with people; the people of this town are minutes away from stoning one of their peers to death and they are carrying on as if this is another community social gathering. Jackson writes this story as an extreme view of the society of today and Kristi Unzicker supports this when she states, “In today’s society we often have an all too-casual attitude toward misfortune” (The Lesser Evil?). In the story, the people are impatient the entire time because they want to get the lottery over with so they can return back to their daily duties. Amy Griffin summarizes the emotion of the villagers when she says “as time passed, the villagers began to take the ritual lightly. They endure it almost as automatons--’actors’ anxious to return to their mundane, workaday lives”(Jackson's The

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