The Significance Of Tradition In Shirley Jackson's The Lottery

Imagine brutally murdering a friend, all for a useless ritual. Watching someone's life end so slowly can hurt a person’s mental self-being. In the short story, The Lottery, by Shirley Jackson, the members of a small village witness the morbid events of their annual ritual. Jackson really gives insight of how helpless some Homo sapiens can be at times. Jackson's inspiration was a result of the anger that was inside her about the persecution of the Jews. She uses the ritual to symbolize the cruelty in the world, the anger that can arouse within the people, and the cooperation of all these deaths. Traditions all have their own unique style. The traditions that exist now differ from the traditions the occurred back then, and the flaws within …show more content…
Corresponding, the people of the village get anxious and jittery for this day. June 27th will just be another day of life or the day of their death. The morning of the event, "The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o'clock, in some towns so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 27th" (paragraph 1). This one certain day represented the one persons death, causing suspense within the village. The anxiety that boiled up within every single person impacted the view they had on the ritual. Furthermore, the annual reaping was something the people were used to. The day everyone dreaded came along and they already knew how it all went down. According to the passage, "the lottery took less than two hours" (paragraph 1). The people just went in, hoped to live one more day, and left. This symbolizes the tradition and its long history with they village, something that got engraved into their mind. Similarly, the way people get nervous and shake with fear is nowhere near the