Shirley Jackson Self Preservation

As a species, we possess an innate selfish human nature with which we are wired to focus solely on our own self preservation before we offer compassion to others. When it comes to life or death situations, all individuals will choose a route that helps themselves, before extending a helping hand to other people in the same situation. The idea of self preservation is not only viewed all throughout the history of different cultures, but it is clearly outlined as a prominent theme in the short story “The Lottery”, written by Shirley Jackson, as well as the entire occurrence of the Holocaust. When reading “The Lottery”, I was initially confused as to what was happening within the storyline. I soon began to realize what exactly the horrendous …show more content…
This disregard was due to the fact that, once again, this awful tradition hadn’t yet affected her or her family, so why should it be an important date for her to remember? This date was so insignificant to her that she was late to the assembly because she, “Clean forgot what day it was” (Jackson 294). If she would have cared enough to contain even the slightest bit of compassion for her neighbors in the sense that this date was significantly more burdening for some of them than it was for her, maybe the story would have ended a little more differently for …show more content…
In both instances, there are people who felt the pressures of societal expectations that were present at that point and time. Those expectations caused said individuals to push aside their humanity and compassion in order to focus on who’s most important in terms of self preservation: themselves. These individuals allowed terrible acts to take place rather than standing up for what is right, solely because they weren’t the ones experiencing this torture. They weren’t the ones being pushed aside like garbage and being put to