Imagine this: an entire town gathers around a black box; the box is then used to perform a lottery, which decides the death of a different individual every year. Although this does not seem morally correct, in the short story “The Lottery” written by Shirley Jackson, a small community holds an annual lottery; in preparation, the boys in town gather stones, the residents gather at the center of the town, and Mr. Summers brought out the black box, all as per tradition. During this lottery, each head of the households within the town goes up one by one to the black box to draw out a slip of paper. The person who drew the marked paper, Bill Hutchinson, was the one whose household had to draw from the black box, which was emptied until there were
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If the reader takes this fact into account, the parallels between the story and the war become easier to discern and are surprisingly evident. As written in “Arbitrary Condemnation and Sanctioned Violence in Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’”, Patrick Shields states, “The story itself shows the atavistic nature lurking beneath humankind’s civilized surface and leads the reader to examine such notions as scapegoating, ritual cleansing, gender, class structure, arbitrary condemnation, and sanctioned violence” (411). In “The Lottery” a drawing takes place to see who will be the one to be ostracized, which ended up being Tessie Hutchinson; in World War II, it was the Jewish people who ended up becoming ostracized. These events are both strong examples of sanctioned violence and ritual …show more content…
For Jackson, it is to connect the readers of her story to how the people of that time felt at the end of World War II. Both the people after the war and the readers of her story asked why such an atrocious event occurred. So why don’t they just quit the lottery? In “The Teachers’ Lounge”, Dudley Barlow notes, “When their annual ritual brings them together, they kill one of their own. Why don’t they quit? Well, they don’t quit, because they don’t know how. Some of them – Old Man Warner – is afraid to quit. The ritual is the cement, he thinks, that keeps the society from slipping back into a brutish nature” (67). This resistance to change is strongly evident when Tessie “wins” and says the whole ordeal was unfair, yet no one did anything to even stand up for her. The same thing happened to the Jewish people, who had done nothing wrong and received unfair treatment based on prejudice. Not only that, but when the Jewish people tried to emigrate from Germany, many countries closed their borders. This is evident of the countries not wanting to change, which is exactly the state of the community within “The Lottery”; a community that is resistant to change. This fear of change is noticed in Old Man Warner’s strong words, “Listening to the young folks, nothing 's good enough for them. Next thing you know, they 'll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work anymore,
If the reader takes this fact into account, the parallels between the story and the war become easier to discern and are surprisingly evident. As written in “Arbitrary Condemnation and Sanctioned Violence in Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’”, Patrick Shields states, “The story itself shows the atavistic nature lurking beneath humankind’s civilized surface and leads the reader to examine such notions as scapegoating, ritual cleansing, gender, class structure, arbitrary condemnation, and sanctioned violence” (411). In “The Lottery” a drawing takes place to see who will be the one to be ostracized, which ended up being Tessie Hutchinson; in World War II, it was the Jewish people who ended up becoming ostracized. These events are both strong examples of sanctioned violence and ritual …show more content…
For Jackson, it is to connect the readers of her story to how the people of that time felt at the end of World War II. Both the people after the war and the readers of her story asked why such an atrocious event occurred. So why don’t they just quit the lottery? In “The Teachers’ Lounge”, Dudley Barlow notes, “When their annual ritual brings them together, they kill one of their own. Why don’t they quit? Well, they don’t quit, because they don’t know how. Some of them – Old Man Warner – is afraid to quit. The ritual is the cement, he thinks, that keeps the society from slipping back into a brutish nature” (67). This resistance to change is strongly evident when Tessie “wins” and says the whole ordeal was unfair, yet no one did anything to even stand up for her. The same thing happened to the Jewish people, who had done nothing wrong and received unfair treatment based on prejudice. Not only that, but when the Jewish people tried to emigrate from Germany, many countries closed their borders. This is evident of the countries not wanting to change, which is exactly the state of the community within “The Lottery”; a community that is resistant to change. This fear of change is noticed in Old Man Warner’s strong words, “Listening to the young folks, nothing 's good enough for them. Next thing you know, they 'll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work anymore,