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A Summary and Analysis of Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Lottery’ is the best-known story of the American writer Shirley Jackson. Published in the New Yorker in 1948 and collected in The Lottery and Other Stories , the story is about a village where an annual lottery is drawn. However, the fate of the person who draws the ‘winning’ slip is only revealed at the end of the story in a dark twist.

‘The Lottery’ forces us to address some unpleasant aspects of human nature, such as people’s obedience to authority and tradition and their willingness to carry out evil acts in the name of superstition.

You can read ‘The Lottery’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis of Jackson’s story below. You might also be interested in the following articles we have written on other aspects of the story:

‘The Lottery’: key quotes explained

‘The Lottery’: key themes discussed

‘The Lottery’: main symbols

But for the present, let’s start with a brief summary of the plot of the story.

‘The Lottery’: plot summary

The story takes place one morning between ten o’clock and noon on 27 June, in a village somewhere in (presumably) the USA. The year is not stated. The three hundred villagers are gathering to undertake the annual ritual of the lottery, which is always drawn on this date every year. Some of the children of the village are busy making a pile of stones which they closely guard in the corner of the village square.

The lottery is led by a Mr Summers, who has an old black box. Inside the black box, slips of paper have been inserted, all of them blank apart from one. The head of each household, when called up to the box by Mr Summers, has to remove one slip of paper.

When every household has drawn a slip of paper, the drawn slips are opened. It is discovered that Bill Hutchinson has drawn the marked slip of paper, and it is explained that, next, one person from within his family must be chosen. His family comprises five people: himself, his wife Tessie, and their three children, Bill Jr., Nancy, and Dave.

Bill’s wife, Tessie, isn’t happy that her family has been chosen, and calls for the lottery to be redrawn, claiming that her husband wasn’t given enough time to choose his slip of paper. But the lottery continues: now, each of the five members of the Hutchinson household must draw one slip from the black box. One slip will be marked while the others are not.

Each of the Hutchinsons draw out a slip of paper, starting with the youngest of the children. When they have all drawn a slip, they are instructed to open the folded pieces of paper they have drawn. All of them are blank except for Tessie’s, which has a black mark on it which Mr Summers had made with his pencil the night before.

Now, the significance of the pile of stones the children had been making at the beginning of the story becomes clear. Each of the villagers picks up a stone and they advance on Tessie, keen to get the business over with. One of the villagers throws a stone at Tessie’s head. She protests that this isn’t right and isn’t fair, but the villagers proceed to hurl their stones, presumably stoning her to death.

‘The Lottery’: analysis

‘The Lottery’ is set on 27 June, and was published in the 26 June issue of the New Yorker in 1948. Perhaps surprisingly given its status as one of the canonical stories of the twentieth century, the story was initially met with anger and even a fair amount of hate mail from readers, with many cancelling their subscriptions. What was it within the story that touched a collective nerve?

We may scoff at the Carthaginians sacrificing their children to the gods or the Aztecs doing similar, but Jackson’s point is that every age and every culture has its own illogical and even harmful traditions, which are obeyed in the name of ‘tradition’ and in the superstitious belief that they have a beneficial effect.

To give up the lottery would, in the words of Old Man Warner, be the behaviour of ‘crazy fools’, because he is convinced that the lottery is not only beneficial but essential to the success of the village’s crops. People will die if the lottery is not drawn, because the crops will fail and people will starve as a result. It’s much better to people like Old Man Warner that one person be chosen at random (so the process is ‘fair’) and sacrificed for the collective health of the community.

There are obviously many parallels with other stories here, as well as various ethical thought experiments in moral philosophy. The trolley problem is one. A few years after Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ was published, Ray Bradbury wrote a story, ‘ The Flying Machine ’, in which a Chinese emperor decides it is better that one man be killed (in order to keep the secret of the flying machine concealed from China’s enemies) than that the man be spared and his invention fall into the wrong hands and a million people be killed in an enemy invasion.

But what makes the lottery in Jackson’s story even more problematic is that there is no evidence that the stoning of one villager does affects the performance of the village crops. Such magical thinking obviously belongs to religious superstition and a belief in an intervening God who demands a sacrifice in recognition of his greatness before he will allow the crops to flourish and people to thrive.

Indeed, in the realms of American literature, such superstition is likely to put us in mind of a writer from the previous century, Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose tales (see ‘ The Minister’s Black Veil ’ for one notable example) often tap into collective superstitions and beliefs among small religious communities in America’s Puritan past.

But even more than Hawthorne, we might compare Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ with a couple of other twentieth-century stories. The first is another ‘lottery’ story and perhaps the most notable precursor to Jackson’s: Jorge Luis Borges’ 1941 story ‘ The Lottery in Babylon ’, which describes a lottery which began centuries ago and has been going on ever since. Although this lottery initially began as a way of giving away prizes, it eventually developed so that fines would be given out as well as rewards.

In time, participation in the lottery became not optional but compulsory. The extremes between nice prizes and nasty surprises, as it were, became more pronounced: at one end, a lucky winner might be promoted to a high office in Babylon, while at the other end, they might be killed.

Borges’ story is widely regarded as an allegory for totalitarianism, and it’s worth bearing in mind that it was published during the Second World War. Jackson’s lottery story, of course, was published just three years after the end of the war, when news about the full horrors of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust were only beginning to emerge in full.

Hannah Arendt, whose The Origins of Totalitarianism was published three years after ‘The Lottery’, would later coin the phrase ‘ banality of evil ’ to describe figures like Adolf Eichmann who had presided over the Nazi regime. Such men were not inherently evil, but were aimless and thoroughly ordinary individuals who drifted towards tyranny because they sought power and direction in their lives.

What is Jackson’s story if not the tale of decent and ordinary people collectively taking part in a horrific act, the scapegoating of an individual? Jackson’s greatest masterstroke in ‘The Lottery’ is the sketching in of the everyday details, as though we’re eavesdropping on the inhabitants of a Brueghel painting, so that the villagers strike us as both down-to-earth, ordinary people and yet, at the same time, people we believe would be capable of murder simply because they didn’t view it as such.

These are people who clearly know each other well, families whose children have grown up together, yet they are prepared to turn on one of their neighbours simply because the lottery decrees it. And the villagers may breathe a collective sigh of relief when little Dave, the youngest of the Hutchinson children, reveals his slip of paper to be blank, but Jackson leaves us in no doubt that they would have stoned him if he had been the unlucky victim.

And the other story with which a comparative analysis of ‘The Lottery’ might be undertaken is another tale about the idea of the scapegoat : Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1973 story, ‘ The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas ’. In Le Guin’s story, the inhabitants of a fictional city, Omelas, enjoy happy and prosperous lives, but only because a child is kept in a state of perpetual suffering somewhere in the city. This miserable child is imprisoned and barely kept alive: the price the inhabitants of Omelas willingly pay for their own bliss.

Or is it? One of the intriguing details of Le Guin’s story is whether we are truly in a magical realm where this one child’s suffering makes everyone else’s joy possible, or whether this is merely – as in Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ – what the townspeople tell themselves .

Just as men like Old Warner cannot even countenance the idea of abandoning the lottery (imagine if the crops failed!), the people of Omelas cannot even entertain the notion that their belief in their scapegoat may be founded on baseless superstition. They’re making the child suffer, in other words, for nothing, just as Tessie Hutchinson is sacrificed for nothing: the crops will fail or flourish regardless. There are no winners in Jackson’s lottery: just three hundred losers.

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Home › Literature › Analysis of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery

Analysis of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 28, 2021

As were many of Shirley Jackson’s stories, “The Lottery” was first published in the New Yorker  and, subsequently, as the title story of The Lottery: or, The Adventures of James Harris in 1949. It may well be the world’s most frequently anthologized short story. A modern horror story, it derives its effect from a reversal of the readers’ expectations, already established by the ordinary setting of a warm June day in a rural community. Readers, lulled into this false summer complacency, begin to feel horror, their moods changing with the narrator’s careful use of evidence and suspense, until the full realization of the appalling ritual murder bursts almost unbearably on them.

The story opens innocently enough, as the townspeople gather for an unidentified annual event connected to the harvest. The use of names initially seems to bolster the friendliness of the gathering; we feel we know these people as, one by one, their names are called in alphabetical order. In retrospect, however, the names of the male lottery organizers—Summer and Graves—provide us with clues to the transition from life to death. Tessie, the soon-to-be-victim housewife, may allude to another bucolic Tess (in Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles ), whose promising beginnings transformed into gore and death at the hands of men.

Shirley Jackson/Erich Hartmann

The scholar and critic Linda Wagner-Martin observes that only recently have readers noticed the import of the sacrificial victim’s gender: In the traditional patriarchal system that values men and children, mothers are devalued once they have fulfilled their childbearing roles. Tessie, late to the gathering because her arms were plunged to the elbow in dishwater, seems inconsequential, even irritating, at first. Only as everyone in the town turns against her— children, men, other women invested in the system that sustains them—does the reader become aware that this is a ritual stoning of a scapegoat who can depend on no one: not her daughter, not her husband, not even her little boy, Davy, who picks up an extraordinarily large rock to throw at her.

No reader can finish this story without contemplating the violence and inhumanity that Jackson intended it to portray. In the irony of its depiction lies the horror of this classic tale and, one hopes, a careful reevaluation of social codes and meaningless rituals.

Analysis of Shirley Jackson’s Stories

https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-authors-voice/a-m-homes-reads-shirley-jackson-the-lottery

BIBLIOGRAPHY Jackson, Shirley. The Lottery: or, The Adventures of James Harris. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1949. Wagner-Martin, Linda. “The Lottery.” In Reference Guide to Short Fiction, edited by Noelle Watson, 783–784. Detroit: St. James Press, 1994.

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Analysis of 'The Lottery' by Shirley Jackson

Taking Tradition to Task

ThoughtCo / Hilary Allison

• Short Stories
• Best Sellers
• Classic Literature
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• Ph.D., English, State University of New York at Albany
• B.A., English, Brown University

When Shirley Jackson's chilling story "The Lottery" was first published in 1948 in The New Yorker , it generated more letters than any work of fiction the magazine had ever published. Readers were furious, disgusted, occasionally curious, and almost uniformly bewildered.

The public outcry over the story can be attributed, in part, to The New Yorker 's practice at the time of publishing works without identifying them as fact or fiction. Readers were also presumably still reeling from the horrors of World War II. Yet, though times have changed and we all now know the story is fiction, "The Lottery" has maintained its grip on readers decade after decade.

"The Lottery" is one of the most widely known stories in American literature and American culture. It has been adapted for radio, theater, television, and even ballet. The Simpsons television show included a reference to the story in its "Dog of Death" episode (season three).

"The Lottery" is available to subscribers of The New Yorker and is also available in The Lottery and Other Stories , a collection of Jackson's work with an introduction by the writer A. M. Homes. You can hear Homes read and discuss the story with fiction editor Deborah Treisman at The New Yorker for free.

Plot Summary

"The Lottery" takes place on June 27, a beautiful summer day, in a small New England village where all the residents are gathering for their traditional annual lottery. Though the event first appears festive, it soon becomes clear that no one wants to win the lottery. Tessie Hutchinson seems unconcerned about the tradition until her family draws the dreaded mark. Then she protests that the process wasn't fair. The "winner," it turns out, will be stoned to death by the remaining residents. Tessie wins, and the story closes as the villagers—including her own family members—begin to throw rocks at her.

Dissonant Contrasts

The story achieves its terrifying effect primarily through Jackson's skillful use of contrasts , through which she keeps the reader's expectations at odds with the action of the story.

The picturesque setting contrasts sharply with the horrific violence of the conclusion. The story takes place on a beautiful summer day with flowers "blossoming profusely" and the grass "richly green." When the boys begin gathering stones, it seems like typical, playful behavior, and readers might imagine that everyone has gathered for something pleasant like a picnic or a parade.

Just as fine weather and family gatherings might lead us to expect something positive, so, too, does the word "lottery," which usually implies something good for the winner. Learning what the "winner" really gets is all the more horrifying because we have expected the opposite.

Like the peaceful setting, the villagers' casual attitude as they make small talk— some even cracking jokes—belies the violence to come. The narrator's perspective seems completely aligned with the villagers', so events are narrated in the same matter-of-fact, everyday manner that the villagers use.

The narrator notes, for instance, that the town is small enough that the lottery can be "through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner." The men stand around talking of ordinary concerns like "planting and rain, tractors and taxes." The lottery, like "the square dances, the teenage club, the Halloween program," is just another of the "civic activities" conducted by Mr. Summers.

Readers may find that the addition of murder makes the lottery quite different from a square dance, but the villagers and the narrator evidently do not.

Hints of Unease

If the villagers were thoroughly numb to the violence—if Jackson had misled her readers entirely about where the story was heading—I don't think "The Lottery" would still be famous. But as the story progresses, Jackson gives escalating clues to indicate that something is amiss.

Before the lottery starts, the villagers keep "their distance" from the stool with the black box on it, and they hesitate when Mr. Summers asks for help. This is not necessarily the reaction you might expect from people who are looking forward to the lottery.

It also seems somewhat unexpected that the villagers talk as if drawing the tickets is difficult work that requires a man to do it. Mr. Summers asks Janey Dunbar, "Don't you have a grown boy to do it for you, Janey?" And everyone praises the Watson boy for drawing for his family. "Glad to see your mother's got a man to do it," says someone in the crowd.

The lottery itself is tense. People do not look around at each other. Mr. Summers and the men drawing slips of paper grin "at one another nervously and humorously."

On first reading, these details might strike the reader as odd, but they can be explained in a variety of ways -- for instance, that people are very nervous because they want to win. Yet when Tessie Hutchinson cries, "It wasn't fair!" readers realize there has been an undercurrent of tension and violence in the story all along.

What Does "The Lottery" Mean?

As with many stories, there have been countless interpretations of "The Lottery." For instance, the story has been read as a comment on World War II or as a Marxist critique of an entrenched social order . Many readers find Tessie Hutchinson to be a reference to Anne Hutchinson , who was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for religious reasons. (But it's worth noting that Tessie doesn't really protest the lottery on principle—she protests only her own death sentence.)

Regardless of which interpretation you favor, "The Lottery" is, at its core, a story about the human capacity for violence, especially when that violence is couched in an appeal to tradition or social order.

Jackson's narrator tells us that "no one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box." But although the villagers like to imagine that they're preserving tradition, the truth is that they remember very few details, and the box itself is not the original. Rumors swirl about songs and salutes, but no one seems to know how the tradition started or what the details should be.

The only thing that remains consistent is the violence, which gives some indication of the villagers' priorities (and perhaps all of humanity's). Jackson writes, "Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones."

One of the starkest moments in the story is when the narrator bluntly states, "A stone hit her on the side of the head." From a grammatical standpoint, the sentence is structured so that no one actually threw the stone—it's as if the stone hit Tessie of its own accord. All the villagers participate (even giving Tessie's young son some pebbles to throw), so no one individually takes responsibility for the murder. And that, to me, is Jackson's most compelling explanation of why this barbaric tradition manages to continue.

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The Lottery

Shirley jackson, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

The Juxtaposition of Peace and Violence

“The Lottery” begins with a description of a particular day, the 27th of June, which is marked by beautiful details and a warm tone that strongly contrast with the violent and dark ending of the story. The narrator describes flowers blossoming and children playing, but the details also include foreshadowing of the story’s resolution, as the children are collecting stones and three boys guard their pile against the “raids of the other boys.” These details…

Human Nature

Jackson examines the basics of human nature in “The Lottery,” asking whether or not all humans are capable of violence and cruelty, and exploring how those natural inclinations can be masked, directed, or emphasized by the structure of society. Philosophers throughout the ages have similarly questioned the basic structure of human character: are humans fundamentally good or evil? Without rules and laws, how would we behave towards one another? Are we similar to animals in…

Family Structure and Gender Roles

The ritual of the lottery itself is organized around the family unit, as, in the first round, one member of a family selects a folded square of paper. The members of the family with the marked slip of paper must then each select another piece of paper to see the individual singled out within that family. This process reinforces the importance of the family structure within the town, and at the same time creates a…

The Power of Tradition

The villagers in the story perform the lottery every year primarily because they always have—it’s just the way things are done. The discussion of this traditional practice, and the suggestion in the story that other villages are breaking from it by disbanding the lottery, demonstrates the persuasive power of ritual and tradition for humans. The lottery, in itself, is clearly pointless: an individual is killed after being randomly selected. Even the original ritual has been…

Dystopian Society and Conformity

Jackson’s “The Lottery” was published in the years following World War II, when the world was presented with the full truth about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. In creating the dystopian society of her story, Jackson was clearly responding to the fact that “dystopia” is not only something of the imagination—it can exist in the real world as well. Jackson thus meditates on human cruelty—especially when it is institutionalized, as in a dystopian society—and the…

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Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery": a Rhetorical Analysis

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The Banality of Evil and Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"

Shirley Jackson published her story The Lottery in the New Yorker this week 66 years ago, on June 26, 1948. It is a powerful and disturbing story about a small and happy New England town where once every year the residents select lots to choose one person who will be stoned, presumably to death. Jackson unfolds the story gradually, and the atmosphere of celebration on lottery day helps hide the dark turn The Lottery ultimately takes in its final paragraphs. The shift amongst the townspeople from the lighthearted conviviality to cold-blooded stoning is shocking and deeply unsettling.

As Erin McCarthy tells us, Jackson’s story ignited an instant controversy.

The Lottery appeared three weeks after Jackson’s agent had submitted it, and there was instant controversy: Hundreds of readers cancelled their subscriptions and wrote letters expressing their rage and confusion about the story. In one such letter, Miriam Friend, a librarian-turned-housewife, wrote “I frankly confess to being completely baffled by Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery . Will you please send us a brief explanation before my husband and I scratch right through our scalps trying to fathom it?” Others called the story “outrageous,” “gruesome,” and “utterly pointless.” “I will never buy The New Yorker again,” one reader from Massachusetts wrote. “I resent being tricked into reading perverted stories like The Lottery .” There were phone calls, too, though The New Yorker didn’t keep a record of what was said, or how many calls came in.

Scholars and critics have drawn comparisons between Jackson’s publication of The Lottery and Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem . Both were originally published in the New Yorker . Controversy attached itself to Arendt’s essays even more lastingly than to Jackson’s. And each concerned ordinary citizens engaging willingly and even proudly in inhuman acts of evil. As Ruth Franklin, who is currently writing a biography of Shirley Jackson observes ,

The Lottery takes the classic theme of man’s inhumanity to man and gives it an additional twist: the randomness inherent in brutality. It anticipates the way we would come to understand the twentieth century’s unique lessons about the capacity of ordinary citizens to do evil—from the Nazi camp bureaucracy, to the Communist societies that depended on the betrayal of neighbor by neighbor and the experiments by the psychologists Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo demonstrating how little is required to induce strangers to turn against each other. In 1948, with the fresh horrors of the Second World War barely receding into memory and the Red Scare just beginning, it is no wonder that the story’s first readers reacted so vehemently to this ugly glimpse of their own faces in the mirror, even if they did not realize exactly what they were looking at.

There are, however, good reasons to resist the easy identifications between Jackson’s tale and Arendt’s insight into the banality of evil. The Berkeley anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber, for example, worried about Jackson’s transplanting of a primitive sacrificial ritual into a realist narrative of a contemporary American town. As Franklin reports, Ursula K. Le Guin, author of probing tales of the thin line between evil and good in novels like The Dispossessed (and Kroeber’s daughter), has said that Kroeber was likely “indignant at Shirley Jackson’s story because as a social anthropologist he felt that she didn’t, and couldn’t, tell us how the lottery could come to be an accepted social institution.” In other words, Jackson presents horrific evil as simply a universal and incomprehensible quality of all humanity.

Whereas Hannah Arendt gets attacked for trying to understand Adolf Eichmann—to make sense of how a normal person could be motivated to participate in systematic inhumanity—Jackson simply presents it as an unsurprising fact. According to McCarthy, “Jackson did weigh in on The Lottery’s meaning:”

“Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult,” she wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle in July 1948. “I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.”

Treating brutality and inhumanity as inexplicable facts absolves Jackson from having to understand both the reasons that such rituals emerge in certain societies and the institutional and social motivations underlying the appearance of systematic evil in modern life. For similar reasons Arendt refuses to accept that the targeting of Jews as Jews during the Holocaust was merely a random act of scapegoating. It was wrong and terrifying and horrific, but there were reasons for it, reasons Arendt attempts to explore in Book One of her classic Origins of Totalitarianism , which is called Antisemitism . Again, in Eichmann in Jerusalem , Arendt rejects the simple and in her experience factually wrong account that Eichmann was a fanatic. She also denies the claim that all people will do evil when given the chance. Instead, she insists we strive to understand what it is that made Eichmann, and so many like him, capable of bureaucratic mass murder. Many faulted Arendt for seeking to understand Eichmann or Antisemitism, arguing that to understand is to excuse. That was not her opinion. Understanding means to face up to reality, whatever it may be, and to resist that reality when necessary.

The Lottery is indeed shocking, but as much for its simplistic and pessimistic account of inherent human evil than for its courage in facing up to reality. Indeed, The Lottery might stand precisely for the view Arendt sought to answer, that evil hides in every human breast just waiting for an opportunity to emerge. You can read Jackson’s The Lottery here .

This post is cross-posted on The American Interest Website.

Thesis Statement For The Lottery

The short story, “The Lottery by Shirley Jackson”, shows how scapegoatism forms violence and cruelty behind the story's structural character Old Man Warner. Warners meaning towards the stoning was that one had to have a connection with fertility in order to have successful crop growth. Warners behavior towards the ritual tradition has changed many things from wooded chips to slips of paper to the black box symbolizing death, and continuing to use stones in their ritual. Thesis Statement: People should stand up to authority and examine their own actions towards what they are about to do to because they are being brought down by the tension to follow the ritual in a gruesome manner and thus falling into peer-pressure. Annotated Bibliography: …show more content…

He evaluates each detail into his own words explaining the meaning behind the authors viewpoints and main ideas. This article connects with my thesis because he gathers information about how authority and male dominance play a role in scapegoatism. Even though male dominance is normal in The Lottery , they should stand up for themselves and point out how stoning someone to death is wrong even though it's considered tradition. They should question whether it is right to kill someone in order to assume fertility for the growth of …show more content…

“Even thought the black box lost its meaning they still remembered to use stones”(Griffin8). The villagers remembered the negative and not the positive in the ritual. The villagers don't think about others just themselves. Griffins statements can be used to state my claim about cruelty behavior. Their main arguments can be used in my essay towards authority and violence. Griffins article talks about how the villagers are being brought down by Old Man Warner and continues the tradition and converting it to violence. Instead of standing up to Warner and protesting that is not right to treat human beings as a form of assumption in sacrifice in order for crop growth to

Tradition In Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery'

Stoning a young, innocent girl to death seems like an indescribable horror. “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, is about a little village of people that all share one thing in common, an annual tradition. Everyone in the village draws a piece of paper from a box to see who “wins.” On this certain day, the Hutchinson family won the drawing. To their horror, the young daughter Tessie, got chosen. In “The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson used the symbolic death of Tessie to illustrate that by sticking with old traditions for no reason, it is deactivating critical thinking, which can lead to destruction and ignorance.

The Lottery Essay

“People see what they want to see and what people want to see never has anything to do with the truth”, said by Roberto Bolano. There are many different perceptions on the events that occur in “The Lottery”, “The Fun They Had”, and also “Eye of the Beholder.” I feel that in “The Lottery”, Tessie was right for arguing against winning the yearly tradition of the lottery. Margie was right for feeling that the past schools were better in “The Fun They Had”, and Janet was right for contrasting herself from the others in “Eye of the Beholder.” Individuals may distinguish their interpretations on distinct feelings or statements.

Analytical Essay On The Lottery

Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” is a story that shows the most shocking elements of humanity. The ending surprises the reader by coming out of nowhere, and shows the brutality that people are capable of. New Yorker Readers were shocked to the point of outrage at the time of its publishing. They were both certain that it was “perverted” and “gratuitously disagreeable,” but also that they didn’t “know what it’s about” (Franklin). Jackson herself hoped the story would “shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives” (Jackson). This shock is very effective, and is in part possible because of how Jackson portrays her characters. She sets the story up to shock the reader by leaving only slight hints, but also by effectively showing how the characters themselves see the event. Jackson highlights the commonplace nature of the event. She portrays the event as a dated ritual, and explains the ways that the people of the town resist it. T ending feels like a surprise because it is brutal and because the characters themselves resist understanding the ritual. Jackson makes the true meaning of the event invisible to everyone except the readers and the victims themselves.

Analysis Of Shirley Jackson 's ' The Lottery '

One aspect that explains the villagers’ obedience towards this terrible tradition stems from Carol Tavris’ ideology about how society favors group submission over moral rebellion. In the short story, the unfortunate family that selected the marked paper was the Hutchinson family. The mother of the family, Tessie Hutchinson, was clearly distraught and believes that the owner of the black box, Mr. Summers did that intentionally. Knowing that one of the family members will be sacrificed, Ms. Hutchinson tries to prevent their doom by accusing Mr.Summers for “‘You didn’t give him time enough to take any he wanted. I saw you. It wasn’t fair!’”(Jackson 3). It is ironic because Tessie has likely stoned other villagers in the past, but when her family is selected that year, she then tries to claim that this is unjust and unfair. Despite her outcries, the villagers explain that everyone had the same chance, and her husband told his wife to “‘Shut up, Tessie,’”(Jackson 3). Even when a barbaric deed is going to be committed, the rest of the villagers conform to its rules. From an outsider’s perspective, this ignorance to morals and willingly following unjust laws is absurd. But this rationale is be explained through Carol Tavris’ “In Groups We Shrink”. In her piece, Tavris explains how people in groups behave far differently than individuals. She proposed that people in groups “... behave badly because they aren’t

Lottery Analysis Essay

This Lottery is a short story written by Shirley Jackson. It was first published in the New Yorker on June 26th 1948. The story takes place on June 27th in a small American village with a population of around 300 people. June 27th is the annual celebration of the lottery, which, in the story, takes places on the same day in nearly every city, town and village. Every person in the village has to take place in the lottery. Due to the small size of the population, the takes place in less than two hours. The townspeople gather in the town square where Mr. Summers, the lottery official, and each head of household draws a slip of paper from an old black box. One of the characters, Tessie Hutchinson, arrives at the event at the last minute,

An Analysis Of Life's Lottery

Firstly, it is necessary to define the unique play experience and dimensions of the novel in order to focus and make sense of the chosen selection. Life’s Lottery is a speculative fiction novel, written in the second person perspective, in which the reader assumes the role of the protagonist, Keith Marion. The reader should treat the work as an interactive game book, participating in the unfolding of events by making subjective choices. It is a branching plot narrative because the book proceeds from the choices the reader makes, and the plot unfolds from this assemblage, reading as a novel would. There are multiple genres the novel can encompass based on the storyline of the choices made and these paths can diverge wildly. The reader is directed

The Lottery Argumentative Essay

Lotteries have made the government over $150 billion since they began in 1964. Lotteries began in 1964 for a new way for people to gamble. It was directly ran by the government because the assumption was that only direct government ownership and control of gambling could guarantee the exclusion of criminal elements. Lotteries are now run by the state as that concern fades over time with the growth of commercial gambling. Also, lotteries are an effective and ethical way for states to earn money for education.

Essay On The Lottery

The short story "The lottery" is a shocking text to read. I think that the main goal of this text is to denounce some injustices there was with the community back in the 50s. At the beginning of the story, everything seems to be normal: "June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green" . But after few pages, we can easily see that there is something wrong with these people.

The Lottery : A Short Story

A short story is a form of storytelling that does not waste space. It serves the reader details only relevant to the storyline. It aims to engage the reader immediately, by not filling the story with useless details but only that to which is necessary and holds their attention. A short story contains very little to no background information. It only provides that to which is required for the story. Each sentence helps develop the storyline and begins as quickly as they end taking the reader from the start to the end on a roll-a-coaster of emotions as they read. What brings a short story to life, is how the story flows and makes the reader feel grabbing their curiosity with little background information, catching their attention with each detail, and bringing them in with the quick developments of the storyline.

Critical Criticism Of The Lottery

Sherley’s Jackson short story, “The Lottery” tells the story of villagers that hold a terrible lottery tradition every year. Even though the story begins with the audiences with a bad close to the community by competing in a crisis tradition on a very important day, and at the end with a death of the “winner” by stoning the person that leads to s discussions between the people, and continued to be revise in modern days (Jackson). The “theory that based on the critical perspective of the story on the reader and his or her perspective” of the text (Parker 314). Jackson reveals two attitudes in her story, the first one is a position to select an individual, and the other one is the ideas that people are victims of this terrible tradition that

Winning The Lottery Research Paper

Winning the lottery can be a big deal for most people. Some people use the money wisely and most let it slip through their fingers. The winning lottery can be either a blessing or a curse, depending on the person uses it. I believe that it would impact my life in tremendous ways, i can’t say either it would have a positive or a negative impact.

Critical Analysis of The Lottery

“The Lottery,” written by Shirley Jackson takes place on the twenty-seventh of June in a small town in the United States. The beginning of the story starts off talking about the local children gathering around and the town square where the lottery is held. At the square, the little boys begin to gather stones from small to large ones and pile them up. The next people to show up at the village square are the husbands as they are discussing daily life amongst each other, then finally, the wives begin the arrive as they talk all about the towns biggest gossips. Unlike other towns that participate in the lottery, where it can take a couple of days to complete, this small town can do it in just a couple of hours due to the small population consisting of about three hundred people. One of the big discussions at the lottery on this day was that other towns were getting rid of the lottery. There is one man, Old Man Warner, the town elder is disgusted of the thought of ending the lottery. He has been around for the lottery since he was a child. The black box that the paper is drawn from is a very significant item to the lottery. The current black box is thought to be made from parts of the original black box. “One by one each male head of the household (or woman if there was no man to take her place) walked up to the box in alphabetical order and drew a slip of paper from the box. They were asked to keep it folded in the palms of their hands without looking. When every family had a

Essay The Lottery

When one thinks of a lottery, they imagine winning a large sum of money. Shirley Jackson uses the setting in The Lottery to foreshadow an ironic ending. The peaceful and tranquil town described in this story has an annual lottery, and you can’t possibly guess what the “prize” is…

The Lottery Literary Analysis

In The Lottery, the setting is a small town with a population of approximately three hundred people. An important theme in this story is recognizing the dangers of blindly following tradition. Once a year in this small town, there is a “lottery”, unfortunately this isn’t like any other lottery where you win money. Instead, on this day, one of the villagers is stoned to death because of a superstition that this town has. They believe that by killing one of their own, they will be blessed with good crop for a year. So, for several years, they have continued this tradition. The villagers’ blind acceptance of the lottery has allowed ritual murder to become a part of their town’s traditions. The townspeople feel powerless to change even though no one is stopping them from changing their so called “tradition”. All of the town’s residents slip a piece of paper containing their name into a black box; even the children are subject to the lottery’s death sentence. One unlucky name is drawn from the box and stoned to death. The elaborate ritual of the lottery is designed so that all villagers have the same chance of becoming the victim. Each year, someone new is chosen and killed. No one is safe. What makes the lottery so entertaining is that everyone turns on the person who is chosen. Friends, and family participate in the stoning with as much enthusiasm as the rest of the villagers.

What Is The Theme Of Violence In The Lottery By Shirley Jackson

A family is chosen each year by a drawing to participate in the lottery. The outcome of the drawing is that one member of that family is chosen to be stoned to death by their family and fellow villagers. “The Lottery” depicts the pointless violence that has now influenced society that violence is acceptable. Shirley Jackson wanted to send the message that harming our own kind would not benefit anyone in any type of way. Harming our own people just brings sadness and pain to society. The stoning of innocent people in this rural town was based on an outdated superstition that would help their crop, and thus was known as a tradition.. From the point of view from the chosen family, the wife was furious, the children were sad, and the husband had no emotion towards the situation. The men looked at the lottery as just another day; they did not think that annual stoning of a person was wrong. An argument that will be discussed in this paper is that forms of fictions such as this leads to the actual increase in violence all around the world. A counterargument that will be presented and discussed in this paper is that fictional violence is fake. There is no connection between fictional violence and real-life

Related Topics

• Short story
• The Lottery
• Shirley Jackson
• The New Yorker
• English-language films

Thesis For The Lottery By Shirley Jackson Essay

The Lottery Template Topic Sentence: One can see by examining the symbolism of the worn out black box, and the foreshadowing of the children putting rocks in their pockets in the The Lottery by Shirley Jackson, that this story is a classic archetypal horror story. Argument: Firstly, one can see that when Mr. Summers arrived at the square carrying a black wooden box, he asked the villagers if anyone would give him a hand with putting the box on the three- legged stool, however, many hesitated to come near the black box, a symbolic twist that foreshadows the imminent ending. The black box has been used for generations, even before the oldest villager. It has been said that the current box was made from the pieces of the …show more content…

So as seen by an earlier statement made by the author it questions the reader, why the children are collecting rocks and putting them off to the side, and could the children be using the stones as a weapon for a ritual or a tradition. This example of foreshadowing fits the classic archetypal horror story, because this turn of events makes the reader afraid of what will happen next, and it shows that maybe children are not innocent or vulnerable as they seem, and that they may be helping to liberate the world of innocent people. This twist fits the pattern, because horror stories generally have characters who do not show innocents and have a different mindset. Concluding Sentence: In Shirley Jackson’s story The Lottery one can see that the symbolism of the black box and the foreshadowing of the children collecting rocks is a classic archetypal horror story because the colour of the box represents death and evil and the rocks foreshadow that they may be used as a weapon later on in the story, which shows that the story is filled with different symbols and object that hint that someone might get punished in the

Interpretive Essay: The Lottery By Shirley Jackson

“The Lottery” Interpretive Essay “The Lottery”, a short story by Shirley Jackson, is about a lottery that takes place in a small village. The story starts of with the whole town gathering in the town square, where Mr. Summers, the official, holds the lottery. After that, every family draws out of an old black box, and a certain family gets picked. Out of the certain family, one person gets picked as the unlucky “winner” of the lottery. In this short story, after the Hutchinson family gets drawn, Tessie Hutchinson is declared “winner” of the lottery.

The Lottery Rhetorical Analysis

In 1948, when the New Yorker published Shirley Jacksons piece, “The Lottery,” it sparked outrage among readers, but could arguably be known as one of her most famous pieces of writing. In this short story, Shirley Jackson used literally elements such as imagery, diction, and symbolism to foreshadow the negative and harsh ending of the story; the harsh ending that sparked such outrage by society in the 1940’s. One of the main ways Jackson foreshadows the ending and true meaning of her short story, “The Lottery,” is through symbolism. Jackson uses the color black throughout the story.

The Lottery Tradition Essay

The Lottery itself represents a primal example of loss of innocence; portrayed through the young boys who gather at the town square to collect rocks for the horrors soon to follow. An illustration of how traditions can lose their true meanings and come to represent violence and warfare. Furthermore, “The Lottery” also represents the decaying characteristics of traditions, as symbolized by the town’s black box, in this case where every year, someone’s name is drawn out of the black box and they are stoned to death, by other members who may or may not end up to be family. Nonetheless, it ends up to be the villagers who

Conflict And Controversy In The Lottery By Shirley Jackson

“The lottery” (1948) Analysis The short story, “The lottery” by Shirley Jackson takes place in a small village. Was conducted the lottery story in 1948. In this story, the lottery is a yearly tradition that takes place in a small American Town.

Annotated Bibliography: The Lottery By Shirley Jackson

Annotated Bibliography 1. Jackson The Lottery By: Yarmove, Jay A. Explicator. Summer94, Vol. 52 Issue 4, p242. 4p.

Research Paper On The Lottery By Shirley Jackson

Symbols such as the black box meaning the towns loyalty to the lottery ritual, to the lottery ritual itself representing tradition, the short story is brimming with hidden elements that are bursting out of the seams of what is Shirley Jacksons' famous short

Examples Of Foreshadowing In The Lottery

People seek to make their beliefs seem real when they are false. “The Lottery” is classic horror story with symbolism and foreshadowing. Shirley Jackson uses foreshadowing and dark themes to reveal the evil nature of the lottery, which is revealed at the end of the story. The main conflict is between Tessie Hutchinson and the rest of the town between the character’s dark actions and the picture-perfect setting and the reader’s skepticism and acceptance of a violent tradition. Mrs. Delacroix’s choice of large stone, home symbolizes the cross, and Tessie’s willingness to participate until Bill draws the black dot that her all show examples of irony.

Social And Class Divisions In Shirley Jackson's The Lottery

Shirley Jackson's The Lottery is about analyzing traditional social and class divisions. Because the story is asking us to think about the ceremony and traditions that we careless following as members of our society. The story is analysis the ways custom is concealed right and wrong, the lottery is becoming a way to analysis social and class divisions. The random samples of paper mean that some of the family are fortunate and that others aren’t fortunate.

Essay On Symbolism In The Lottery By Shirley Jackson

The Symbolism of The Lottery One big symbol that the short story is discreet about is the black box that is repeated throughout the short story symbolizes fear to adults which could affect even the most innocent. The black box appears to be the only paraphernalia that is still being used in the tradition of having a lottery. Mr. Summers is the one who is running the lottery at the time. Mr. Summers is seen as a nice man, however, when he is introduced, he is seen with the black box. “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson is a short story that uses the black box as a symbol to convey an underlying message that when the power of a tradition is given to a person, it could lead a crumbling society.

How Does Shirley Jackson Build Suspense In The Lottery

3/8/2017 The lottery essay Anan Istetieh Anticipation mingled with uncertainty, better known, as suspense, is an inevitable quality of human nature. Suspense is occasionally a great mechanism. It allows the author to keep the readers alert and leads up to the element of surprise, which is a successful writing tool that makes a story more enjoyable. The story “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson builds up suspense through the foreshadowing of a horrible moment, creating a character that stands out from the crowd all while withholding the true nature of the story. The author of “The Lottery” foreshadowed the horrible climax of the story by explaining how the children were recently released from school for the summer, but they felt discomfort, “and

Literary Elements In The Lottery

Literary Elements used in The Lottery By definition the word lottery means a process or thing whose success or outcome is measured by chance (“lottery”). To most people winning the lottery would conjure up excitement and overall good feelings. However, in the short story The Lottery written by Shirley Jackson, the lottery has a twisted and horrific meaning.

The Negative Consequences Of Tradition In The Lottery By Shirley Jackson

In her story "The Lottery", Shirley Jackson implies the negative consequences of blindly following tradition through the acceptance, by the villagers, of the tradition of the lottery. Jackson suggests that the people of the village are afraid to give up the little tradition they have, even if it is not good. Every year after the lottery, the conductor of the lottery, Mr. Summers suggests that they should build a new box but, “No one [likes] to upset even as much tradition as [is] represented by the box.” (Jackson, 1). The black box symbolizes ritual and tradition.

Conformity In Shirley Jackson's The Lottery

Jackson gives an impression that the shabby, black box is a personal and constant reminder to the people so that they must remain faithful to the tradition of their forefathers and never ponder on the notion that those customs might be wrong or immoral. In addition, the villagers’ behavior towards the box embodies their assessment on the entire system of the lottery. They seem to be frightened by the lottery and the box, but they are even more petrified to alter or doubt one or the other. Pressures, traditions and longstanding beliefs may potentially guide that society to an extensive ignorance and sanctioned malevolence that is directly strengthened by

Thesis For The Lottery By Shirley Jackson

“The Lottery”, a short story by Shirley Jackson, is about a lottery that takes place in a small village. The story starts off with the whole town gathering in the town square, where Mr. Summers holds the lottery. Once everyone gathers, every family draws a slip of paper out of an old black box, and the family with the black mark on their paper gets picked. After that, each family member older than 3 years of age re-draws a slip of paper again and this time, the person with the black mark on their paper gets picked as the “lucky winner” of the lottery. In this short story, after the Hutchinson family gets drawn, Tessie Hutchinson is declared “winner” of the lottery, with her reward is being stoned to death.

The Importance Of Tradition In The Lottery By Shirley Jackson

They do not want to follow the other towns that had given up the lottery. The townspeople are apprehensive of transition because of the unknown factors. One of the examples in the story that shows their lack of willingness to change their customs is the battered black box they use for the lottery. It has been stained and the original color of the wood is shown on the side. Every year, Mr. Summers, who manages the lottery suggests to the villagers to get a new box.

More about Thesis For The Lottery By Shirley Jackson Essay

Conformity in “The Lottery” by S. Jackson Essay

A good literary work is usually expected to teach the reader, and it often tells something significant about human nature and the nature of social relations. Thus, a piece of literature can be discussed as significant or worthy when its content is used to focus the readers’ attention n on controversial issues that are often not expressed openly in the society; when the work can reveal the aspects of social relations that are often misunderstood; and when the work can provoke the readers to face problems that are usually ignored in the society.

In this case, an author can choose to be sarcastic, ironical, or straightforward while conveying the main idea. In her short story titled “The Lottery”, Shirley Jackson concentrates on representing the members of the American ‘typical’ community who hold the controversial customary lottery during the years.

While making their neighbors become sacrificial victims of the tradition that is mistakenly meant to lead to high harvests, the villagers appear to be in the situation when the largest public fear is not human death, but the rejection of the tradition (Jackson 6).

From this perspective, a good literary work points at significant controversial and hidden issues that need to be discussed openly, and it provokes readers to look at the problem from the new side, as it is in Jackson’s “The Lottery”, where the human sacrifice is perceived as normal, the role of tradition is overestimated, and conformity is associated with ignorance.

Thus, Jackson’s short story discusses the possibility of the human sacrifice in the American society as a metaphorical illustration for a range of controversial rules, traditions, and customs that can be the part of the community during many years. The brutal character of these activities is usually hidden under many peaceful names, like a ‘lottery’, in order to avoid the public’s resistance.

The characters of Jackson’s short story perceive a lottery like a normal event, that is similar to “the square dances, the teen club, the Halloween program” as “civic activities” popular in the village (Jackson 1). It seems that almost no one in the village sees and understands the violence and threat of this lottery as an ‘ordinary’ event.

The problem is in the fact that even if the villagers see their tradition as outdated, they seem to hide the fact that it is brutal and immoral. From this point, the author intends to accentuate the idea that strange and negative events happen in all societies, and it is necessary to find strength the to admit and then oppose these events, traditions, and rules.

It is also necessary to note that the tradition of a lottery is highly overestimated by the people in the village, as it is described by Jackson in the story. The reason is that the villagers chose to link or associate the human sacrifice with the prosperity and stability in the village, and this wrong opinion is one of simple case uses of people’s annual deaths in this community. The lottery seems to be reasonable because it emphasizes the civilization that is proved to be characteristic for the villagers (Jackson 4).

Thus, a single path for those people rejecting the tradition is “to go back to living in caves” (Jackson 4). The human sacrifice is perceived as the origin of the good for the villagers because they say, “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon” (Jackson 4). In this context, Jackson stresses on misconceptions and misunderstandings associated with following traditions in the society. The author masterly uses the image of a lottery in order to state that people are often misled in society, and they need to look at issues from many perspectives.

Conformity that is the cause and consequence of ignorance typical for the villagers is associated with their fear to reject the strange and even pagan tradition and stand against the opinion of the majority. Any attempts to speak about forgetting this aggressive tradition are prevented by those villagers who do not know how to live the other way. People can only guess that “over in the north village they’re talking of giving up the lottery” (Jackson 4).

However, they even try to avoid thinking about that scenario in their village because everyone has doubts even regarding changing the box for the lottery (Jackson 1).

In this case, the village is an example of the society where conformity and absence of the public’s opposition can lead to obvious tragedies and to individual victims stoned to death. In this significant literary work, the author attracts the audience’s attention to the issue of the public’s indifference that is often connected with observed conformity. From this point, Jackson discusses the important questions about the nature of conformist societies and about the role of an individual’s opposition to the views of the majority.

However, the story by Shirley Jackson can also be discussed as too horrific and unrealistic in order to be considered as a worthy piece of literature that makes the public think about the important issues. The supporters of this idea can state that the readers’ main feelings associated with this short story are fear, disgust, and antipathy. As a result, any important social lessons cannot be understood and perceived adequately.

Nevertheless, it is significant to state that the metaphorical content of Jackson’s short story is even more effective to catch the audience’s attention than everyday reportages. While focusing on the nature of the villagers’ aggression and misconceptions, the readers become to understand that conformity is the main cause of tragedies in the village where brutal traditions seem to be more significant for people than the lives of their family members.

From this point, Jackson’s short story is most effective to represent the opposite sides of conformity in the society while discussing how the life of one community member can be sacrificed for the good of others without any sound reason to support the choice.

It is important to focus the readers’ attention on the literary piece written by Shirley Jackson because “The Lottery” is a perfect example that demonstrates how the society can be ignorant and misled while focusing on the wrong beliefs that are in opposition to the world principles of morality.

The writer concentrates on the controversial situation when conformity leads to corrupting and destroying the basic social rules. In “The Lottery”, the understanding and vision of the rules of the stable and peaceful life can be discussed as substituted with the focus on outdated pagan traditions according to which the choice of a scapegoat can help the community to resolve the problems. This problem is typical for many modern societies following the traditions of the past.

Works Cited

Jackson, Shirley. The Lottery . 2010. Web.

• Chicago (A-D)
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Bibliography

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The Lottery: Essay Topics & Samples

The Lottery is one of those stories that can be interpreted in a million different ways. The author brings up many cultural, social, and even political issues for discussion. It is so controversial that the readers were sending hate mails to Jackson!

Our specialists will write a custom essay specially for you!

Did you receive a writing assignment on The Lottery by Shirley Jackson? Have no idea where to start? Don’t panic! Sometimes you can find it hard to decide on one topic when there are so many options. This short story also has many Easter eggs to analyze. Custom-Writing.org experts created this list of the best ideas for the essay and The Lottery essay questions to help you out!

• 💡 Essay Topics
• ✒️ Essay Samples

💡 The Lottery: Essay Topics

Don’t know where to start your essay on The Lottery by Shirley Jackson? Check out the prompts to help you write a successful paper!

• Literary analysis essay on The Lottery by Shirley Jackson . For this task, you would need to work through the main themes of the story . However, to make it easier, you might want to focus on one topic at a time. For instance, write about the role of tradition and how powerful it can be.
• How are gender roles represented in the story? Look closer to how the roles are divided in this fictional society. There is violence against women, but it doesn’t seem like they are allowed to play victims. Can you catch a glimpse of sexism in some situations? You might as well draw some parallels with the real world.
• How much do traditions affect our lives? The Lottery as an example . In this analysis essay on The Lottery , you are asked to elaborate on the central theme of the story. Shirley Jackson shows tradition to be so strong and powerful in this society that the rational mind can’t even bring others to reason.
• Social classes in The Lottery . Are there any characters in the short story that may seem a bit more privileged than the others? All villagers seem to be in the same boat with equal rights. What about Mr. Summers? His name is on the list, and he draws with everybody else, but doesn’t he have more powers?
• The psychology of the crowd in the short story . You are asked to write an argumentative essay on The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. Look for some strong arguments to support the idea. However, there is no need to come up with complicated psychoanalytic theories. Focus on your personal opinion and add some quotes.
• Hidden symbols in Shirley Jackson’s story . Here, it would help if you worked on literary analysis for a little bit. There are some apparent symbols, such as the black box and the stones. But how many more can you find? For example, look at the importance of households and write a symbolism essay on The Lottery .
• Investigate the phenomenon of hypocrisy in The Lottery . The villagers can be friendly and kind to their neighbors before the ritual begins . However, as soon as they know the results, they immediately turn against “the winner.” Tessie seems like she would do the same, but when she appears to be the chosen one, it doesn’t please her at all.
• Tessie Hutchinson as a scapegoat in The Lottery . What can make you think that the main character serves as a scapegoat for the villagers? She might not have a good reputation among them. What do you think drives them to stone her to death? Start a debate on this issue, and don’t forget to use our literature study guide!
• The significance of names in Shirley Jackson’s story . You might have noticed the specifics of the main characters’ names. For instance, Mr. Summers fits perfectly in the setting of a beautiful summer day. Mr. Delacroix, in his turn, carries some hidden religious meaning if you look up the translation. Can you find any other meaningful names?
• What is the central message of The Lottery ? You might have thought about it after reading the summary of the short story. Well, there is no specific answer because everything depends on your perspective. It may concern social or political issues or whatever you prefer. It is what makes your essay so unique, isn’t it?

✒️ The Lottery: Essay Samples

Below you’ll find a collection of The Lottery essay examples. You are welcome to use them for inspiration!

• Point of View in “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson
• The Lottery Analysis: Essay on Shirley Jackson’s Short Story
• The Lottery: Literary Analysis
• Groupthink Notion in “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson
• Gothic Horror in “The Lottery”
• Foreshadowing in The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
• Crowd Impersonation in “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson
• Gender Equality in Jackson’s “The Lottery”
• Herd Behavior in “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson
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On a warm sunny day, all the villagers gathered to kill their randomly chosen neighbor. They had repeated this ritual for many ages. What forced them to be so cold-hearted and narrow-minded? Why did the first readers of the short story get insulted with the plot? What does Shirley Jackson...

A short summary of The Lottery comes down to a description of a pretty violent tradition of one community. Despite a quite optimistic and positive beginning, the reader will soon find out that something feels off about it. The community uses the lottery to pick one person for a sacrifice....

This article by Custom-Writing.org experts contains all the information about the characters in The Lottery by Shirley Jackson: Tessie Hutchinson, Bill Hutchinson, Mr. Summers, Old Man Warner, and others. In the first section, you’ll find The Lottery character map. 🗺️ The Lottery: Character Map Below you’ll find a character map...

What do the stones symbolize in The Lottery? What about the black box? What is its main theme? There are so many questions to attend to about this story, so this article by Custom-Writing.org experts is here to help you out! Apart from discussing the symbolism in The Lottery, we...

The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant is a short story, which focuses on the differences between appearance and reality. Here, we’ll talk more about the story, plot, the central conflict, characters, themes, and symbols. In The Necklace study guide, you will also learn about the genre and the author’s message....

Writing an essay can be a challenge, even from the very beginning. Coming up with an eye-catching and exciting idea might be a bit of a process. Therefore, we have prepared a list of topics on The Necklace to choose from. Also, you can find essay samples and take a...

The Necklace is one of the most famous short stories that talks about a woman whose dreams of wealth got shattered. The author Guy De Maupassant uses several literary devices, such as metaphors or symbolism, to enhance the reader’s perception. So, what does the necklace symbolize in The Necklace? What...

The Necklace is a sensational story with an unexpected twist in the end. In the article, we will discuss theme of The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant. The literary analysis will show their importance for a better understanding of the story. The Necklace themes include Appearance vs. Reality and Greed....

The Necklace by Guy De Maupassant is an astonishing short story capturing readers’ attention with its realistic plot and an unexpected twist in the end. This article will focus on describing The Necklace’s main characters. So, who is the protagonist in The Necklace? Keep reading to find out more about...

The Necklace (French: La Parure) is a short story written by Guy de Maupassant in 1884. The story became an instant success, as most of the other works written by Guy de Maupassant. In the article, you’ll see its brief summary and analysis. The Necklace: Summary The Necklace by Guy...

Welcome to the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight study guide! Here, you will find all the essential information about the poem’s plot and genre. You will also learn about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight story’s characters, themes, and symbols. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Key Facts Full...

Assigned to write an essay about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, you may face difficulties coming up with a good topic. This page can help you with that. Here you will find some of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight essay topics, prompts & samples. Essay Topics Language and...

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Single dad went to grocery store for salad, returned with $1M lottery win

When he got his lottery ticket scanned the next week to check whether he'd won anything, the worker told him not to pass out!

• Jennifer Graham Kizer
• April 19, 2024

As the popular lottery slogan goes, you’ve got to be in it to win it. And a Midwestern dad named Brant Edgington very nearly wasn’t. He had stepped into the Baker’s grocery story in Fremont, Nebraska, to pick up a salad for his lunch and figured he’d spend a few extra dollars on a Mega Millions lottery ticket. Several days later, he learned he’d won a $1 million prize.

“I don’t play all that often,” he said after his win, according to a Nebraska Lottery press announcement . “As a single parent, baloney is more important, financially.”

The odds of winning $1 million playing the multi-state Mega Millions game are 1 in 12,607,306, so that’s a reasonable point!

Though not an avid lottery player, Edgington says he does get in when the jackpot gets high. However, he wasn’t planning on buying a ticket at all that day. But as he waited in line at the store while a customer ahead of him cashed in some scratch-off tickets, he decided to play.

The following Saturday, Edgington was back at the store and checked to see if he’d won. The Check-a-Ticket scanner wasn’t working for him, so he asked a clerk to see if he’d hit the jackpot.

“They disappeared for a minute,” he said. “Then a different lady came up with her and they just stared at me. She told me, ‘Don’t pass out when I tell you this … ’”

He claimed his prize on April 5, and hopefully he’s a little less worried about buying baloney for his kids now.

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Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

Stories that begin full of hope — then take a turn., on this week’s episode:.

A girl signs up for a class. A couple hires an accountant. Several co-workers decide to pool their money and buy a bunch of lottery tickets. In the beginning, they’re full of hope and optimism … then something turns.

Stories of good ideas gone bad.

This is a rerun of an episode that first aired in January 2006.

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