Third Person In Shirley Jackson's The Lottery

In “The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson uses third person objective to tell a story without showing the characters feelings, or opinions, while still giving an objective view. She makes it very difficult to read a character and tell how they feel. This story would not have been as effective as it is to the reader if she had not used third person. The tradition and ritual in Shirley Jackson’s story seems to be as old as the town itself, so old no one truly knows why they even have the lottery to begin with, yet this opens up detail about each character and their purpose to the story.
Since Jackson uses third person objective it is difficult to tell how a character is feeling or what they think about certain situations. With her using this one may find it to be difficult to figure out what a person …show more content…
In this story there are many possibilities of how a character may act and if they may change. These characters may have different thoughts or feelings as the story continues throughout time. Tessie Hutchinson changed throughout the story one may believe that she is a flat character. In the beginning of the story she was very late to the lottery, but after she got there she was all for the lottery and wanted it to happen. Yet when her family did not get a fair chance to pull their card out she was very offended and demanded another drawing. After redrawing the cards her card ended up having the black dot. This meant that she was going to be stoned to death. One may say that it was karma that she drew the card with the dot. Although I feel that Shirley Jackson did this to prove a point about greed and to take what you get. Mr. Summers is sought out to be a stock character. He is over the lottery and makes all the choices and decides what happens. Yet what was surprising was that when Tessie demanded a redraw he did not argue it at all and let her have her way and got what she