“The crowd was quiet. A girl whispered, "I hope it's not Nancy, " ; not every winner of a lottery contest receives a grand prize (Backpack Literature 242). When reading the beginning of the fictional short story The Lottery, the title leads the reader to assume that someone in the story will come into some type of luck. The theme of this story is almost hidden until the author reveals the story’s true meaning towards the end. Shirley Jackson gives the reader subtle symbolic hints that the small New England town has a ritualistic nature. When the reader reaches the ending of The Lottery; all of Shirley Jackson’s clues start to come together like puzzle pieces. The reader learns that the lottery is an annual sacrificial ritual where the winner
