The Lottery Movie And Book Comparison Essay

There are a vast amount of differences and few similarities between the short story “The Lottery,” written by Shirley Jackson, and the 1996 film, which was directed by Daniel Sackheim. While both the story and the film have similar settings and focus on the lottery that occurs once a year on June 27th, the characters have different roles in the film than they do in the short story and the plot develops differently. Both the short story and the film take place in small towns with a few hundred people which makes the lottery much shorter than in other towns that still do it. The lottery takes place on the same day in each storyline. The head of the household gets called and picks a paper from the black box. Whichever person receives the black dot has to choose again with their family and the one to end up with the dot in the end is stoned to death. The process is the same for both however it has different symbolic meaning. While in the story it seems to be …show more content…
Although both seemed to revolve around the lottery the story was more straightforward. In the film, Jason Smith was raised in a different place and he had gone back to his home town to spread his father’s ashes when he got mixed up in the lottery. At first, he had no idea what the lottery was and he slowly realized while he was visiting the cemetery that a majority of the deaths in the town of New Hope occurred on the 27th of June. After the lottery took place Jason believes it is murder and while talking with Felice she says, “It's no more than someone sacrificing themselves in a war” (Sackheim 1:20:00). Smith does not understand the purpose of the lottery and while he thinks it is wrong the rest of the people believe that it is a perfectly normal ritual that has occurred every year of their lives. In the short story there were no outsiders who thought this was wrong however, there were characters who talked of other towns stopping the