Homo homini lupus - man is a wolf to man - is a phrase, first used by Plautus, but became famous in Hobbes work “De Cive,“ where it describes the state of nature of the humans before civilization. It means humans are naturally inhuman to each other and this is the motive of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery“. Hobbes believed this behavior can be defeated by civilization. On the other hand Jackson tries to show with her parable that especially civilization is the cause why man becomes wolves.
The story plays in a small village with 300 inhabitants in the USA of June 27th in 1948, the same time where it was written. At the beginning Jackson draws a scenic scene of the village: A warm summer day, with children playing with stones, men joking and housewives chatting. All the people together gathered in the central square of the village. Mr. Summer, who runs the lottery, comes with a Black Box to the Square. Every family has a leader, who picks a paper slip out of the box and then he is called by Mr. Summer. These rituals do exist as long as …show more content…
First of all, the scapegoat in the Jewish culture: there was one day in the year when they could symbolically load up all their sins on a goat and it was sent into the desert to die and all the sins with it. Ending this ritual, would bring bad luck and God’s anger. In Jackson’s story the villagers believe that if they stop the ritual a bad crop would come. Even so the originally ritual with the scapegoat extinct, but the phenomena goes on. An example is to blame immigrants for being unemployed or the Jewish themselves have become scapegoats over the centuries. Without any logical reason we start to judge and hate someone or something and over generations we just know to hate them because we always have done it like that. So the lottery, the random process to the murder, is a metaphor for the randomness how people, certain groups and societies choose their
The story plays in a small village with 300 inhabitants in the USA of June 27th in 1948, the same time where it was written. At the beginning Jackson draws a scenic scene of the village: A warm summer day, with children playing with stones, men joking and housewives chatting. All the people together gathered in the central square of the village. Mr. Summer, who runs the lottery, comes with a Black Box to the Square. Every family has a leader, who picks a paper slip out of the box and then he is called by Mr. Summer. These rituals do exist as long as …show more content…
First of all, the scapegoat in the Jewish culture: there was one day in the year when they could symbolically load up all their sins on a goat and it was sent into the desert to die and all the sins with it. Ending this ritual, would bring bad luck and God’s anger. In Jackson’s story the villagers believe that if they stop the ritual a bad crop would come. Even so the originally ritual with the scapegoat extinct, but the phenomena goes on. An example is to blame immigrants for being unemployed or the Jewish themselves have become scapegoats over the centuries. Without any logical reason we start to judge and hate someone or something and over generations we just know to hate them because we always have done it like that. So the lottery, the random process to the murder, is a metaphor for the randomness how people, certain groups and societies choose their