Emel Zivali
09/08/14
"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson Response Paper
The short story " The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson was a confusing and odd read for me. However, it was unique as well. Starting off, the story introduces the village lottery day and makes the reader believe that it is a positive thing, however, in irony it turns out to not so necessarily be a lottery. While I reading the story I was getting excited to see who the lottery winner was going to be and thought who wouldn't want a lottery every year. I then saw that it was a lottery of which person they were going to sacrifice from the village that year. Shirley Jackson does a good job using different themes to make the reader learn lessons from reality itself. The story was actually a representation of humanity and the society we live in.
In Shirley Jackson's short story, she actually reveals the theme that most people pretend not to see; violence and cruelty.
Humanity is not always extremely kind; in fact, humans can be very brutal creatures. In the short story, the people of the village gather around and almost create a ceremony out of a lottery to decide who is going to get killed. They then use the stones they had previously gathered up and stone the person. Another thing I realized is, it was a every man for themselves kind of situation. During the withdraw of the "lottery", Tessie Hutchinson's family did not seem to help their mother/ wife out. They almost seemed relieved it wasn't them. Jackson uses the sense of man vs. society conflict to really show us that society may actually accept things that some of us don't agree to. Although some might find it to be immoral, society still...