Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery”, takes place in a small village, and portrays the villages people as the protagonists of the story, and uses the ritual of the lottery as the antagonists. The lottery is where there is a box with some tickets, and a family is called up to pick from this box. On one of the tickets is a black mark, whoever picks this ticket would be pelted by rocks to death. The symbols in the short story, “The Lottery”, communicates the story’s meaning by symbolising death using the black box, the tickets, and the black mark on one of the tickets. The black box in “The Lottery” is described by Shirley Jackson as, “The black box grew shabbier every year; by now it was no longer completely black but splintered badly
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For example, when they talk about the box (refer to lines 1-3 of paragraph 2), The narrator said the box was shabby, splintered, and the color was fading. This shows it is old and has been used for a long, and this means the village has been performing this ritual for an exponential amount of time. With the tickets the narrator says, “Mr. Summers had been successful in having slips of paper substituted for the chips of wood that had been used for generations. Chips of wood, Mr. Summers had argued, had been all very well when the village was tiny, but now the population was more than three hundred and likely to keep on growing, it was necessary to use something that would fit more easily into the black box.” Considering the need to fit more tickets into the box, perhaps the purpose of the whole ritual of the lottery is to stunt the growth of over-population. With the black mark on the ticket, it helps represent death by, again, using the color black to represent the emptiness left behind after the person who receives the black marked ticket, and gets murdered, Through further analysis of the symbols in the story, “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, the meaning of the story has been revealed. The black box shows that the village has been performing the lottery ritual for a long lasting interval of time. The ticket shows that they use this ritual for a reason, perhaps to stunt the problem of the continuing growth of over-population. The black mark on the ticket represents the missing life that follows after the performance of the ritual. Thus the symbols help present the meaning of the
For example, when they talk about the box (refer to lines 1-3 of paragraph 2), The narrator said the box was shabby, splintered, and the color was fading. This shows it is old and has been used for a long, and this means the village has been performing this ritual for an exponential amount of time. With the tickets the narrator says, “Mr. Summers had been successful in having slips of paper substituted for the chips of wood that had been used for generations. Chips of wood, Mr. Summers had argued, had been all very well when the village was tiny, but now the population was more than three hundred and likely to keep on growing, it was necessary to use something that would fit more easily into the black box.” Considering the need to fit more tickets into the box, perhaps the purpose of the whole ritual of the lottery is to stunt the growth of over-population. With the black mark on the ticket, it helps represent death by, again, using the color black to represent the emptiness left behind after the person who receives the black marked ticket, and gets murdered, Through further analysis of the symbols in the story, “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, the meaning of the story has been revealed. The black box shows that the village has been performing the lottery ritual for a long lasting interval of time. The ticket shows that they use this ritual for a reason, perhaps to stunt the problem of the continuing growth of over-population. The black mark on the ticket represents the missing life that follows after the performance of the ritual. Thus the symbols help present the meaning of the