The Lottery By Shirley Jackson Analysis

It is typical for people to have conspiracies about why something was written, its true meaning, and how it ties up with the life of the character. “The Lottery” is a short story written by Shirley Jackson that tells a story about a village who held a very unusual tradition. Every year the head of the household would pick a piece of paper from the “black box”, and whoever held the paper with the black dot had just summoned one of their family members to death by stoning. It is believed that there is more to Jackson’s short story than she wanted the audience to understand, it is said that “The Lottery” has a connection to the bible. There is a reason why Jackson chose the names she chose, the numbers, and the ideas that she chose to write this story. It is clear that Shirley Jackson wanted to make a connection to the Bible with her story “The Lottery” by using names such as Adam and Zanini, the number seven, and the sacrifice by stoning. To begin …show more content…
Delacroix means “of the cross” in French. In the story “Delacroix” is often mispronounced by the rest of the people as “Dellacroy”. Cervo states that “the mispronunciation signals the villagers botching of the traditional Christian understanding of the crucifixion” (Cervo 183), meaning they do not understand what the tradition really is. Delacroix is the last name of the family who has already prepared their stones and are ready to “cast the first stone”. The stoning goes back to John 8 in the Bible where a women was about to get stoned to death. The people were waiting for Jesus to say something wrong in order to stone him, to use him as a scapegoat, but it did not happen, instead he said “he who is free of sin cast the first stone”, and everyone realized that they were living in sin. In this case the villagers are confused like Cervo said and they needed a scapegoat someone to blame everything on, someone to sacrifice, and it just happened to be