The Psychological Subgenre In Shirley Jackson's The Lottery

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The Horror genre is a literature genre of fiction which has the characteristic or the capacity to create scare or frighten their readers. This genre popularity increased in incredible ways in the last couple of years with the development of the movies and television industries. This genre such as in a movie or in a book has incredible popularity and grabs the attention of a big number of audience Some enjoy that adrenaline feeling, being in danger, expecting the unknown, death, all the feelings and more people experiences at the moment of reading or watching horror, some of the people really enjoys it, other people prefer not to watch the movie, just like me. Among the genius works of literature of the horror genre I would like to name and …show more content…
The first one I am going to use is the psychological subgenre. This subgenre is usually written from a tight viewpoint, which relies on the character 's fears and/or abnormal psyche to frighten readers, viewers or players. Is the protagonist really seeing terrible things, perhaps battling against human conspiracies and/or demonic possession -- or is he going insane? On the flip side, this subgenre can feature an insane protagonist, such as a tormented serial killer. One of the stories I have read that presents psychological characteristics is “The Lottery”. This short story by Shirley Jackson is about a small town in the middle of nowhere that celebrates a really creepy and weird tradition every year to take care of the crops of corn, the tradition consisted in a lottery where all the people of this small town participated, and the who’s name “won” the lottery, this person, should with killed and sacrificed, and every member of the town should kill this “winner” by throwing and hitting this person with stones. No matter if he or she was your mother, uncle, friend, neighbor, if you win the lottery, you lost your life. This story shows the readers the psychological situation of all the people I this towns, and how this story, judge by a normal person, is horrible and creepy, but judge by a person that lives in that town, is completely normal to have a killing lottery every year. The last detail from …show more content…
This short story by Poe completely enters in the Psychological subgenre, but shows way more mental stability than “The Lottery”. This story is about revenge, but a revenge that is unknown for the readers, the protagonist Montresor wants to kill Fortunato, because the last one insulted the protagonist. In the story, the reader never finds out which or what was the insult Fortunato made against Montresor, but the only thing we know is that the protagonist finds his revenge by locking and baring Fortunato alive in the catacombs. The protagonist later tells the story 50 years after of this revenge happened, and describes about how nobody in the town ever doubted from

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