Compare And Contrast The Lottery And The Man In The Well

Decision-making is an essential tool in daily life. When a person is faced with a situation, they will normally choose the best way to overcome the situation. However, this is not always the case. In the short stories “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson and “The Man in the Well” by Ira Sher, many characters knowingly commit immoral acts. Although the stories’ content differs, the core concepts behind each story are the same. The events in the stories leave the reader with different messages, but develop a common theme: people are usually more likely to make consequential decisions while in groups, rather than when they are alone. In “The Lottery”, the townspeople accurately represent the stated theme. Each year, the town hosts a public sacrifice (the lottery) for their crops, where they stone one person to death. During the events in “The Lottery”, it had been the “seventy-seventh time” Old Man Warner had partaken in the lottery (Jackson 4). A time period of seventy-seven years or more provides numerous opportunities to everyone in the town to try to change the law regarding the lottery, but nobody did. Some …show more content…
“The Lottery” develops its theme through the concept of peer pressure, while “The Man in the Well” develops its theme through the concept of power and judgment. For example, in “The Man in the Well”, Aaron, one of the kids, lies to the man and, as a form of power over the man, explains that his father is coming with the police (Sher 3). However, Aaron was influenced by the presence of the other kids to lie to him. “The Lottery” and “The Man in the Well” are also centered around a group versus individual conflict structure. Therefore, the theme for each story happens to represented in a way which involves the consequences of group actions on individuals. Although the stories use different perspectives for the development of theme, both stories share a common