Shirley Jackson

In “The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson exemplifies how the annual stoning enables the otherwise rational humans in the town to make scapegoats out of their peers. Jackson accomplishes this through the actions and descriptions of the characters throughout the story, including the roles of the women in the community, which demonstrates how those who have less power are typically targets for scapegoating. Additionally, the village elder, Old Man Warner, serves to demonstrate how humans are capable of…

you have to wonder if she didn’t win, would she just have been a willing participant. The lottery, the black box and all the rituals involved are illogical, and the ending of the story is very disturbing, it shows a disregard for human life. Jackson shows how humanity hasn’t progressed and leaves us with the feeling it’s all going to happen again the following…

Fear In Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” Most people would like to win the lottery because it has to deal with winning money. In this story the lottery deals with death. The lottery in real life is about winning “big bucks” and becoming a millionaire. In this story, Shirley Jackson uses the lottery to symbolize death for the townspeople. In “The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson uses the black box, the stones, and the black-dotted piece of paper to symbolize the fear of the townspeople. In transition,…

Analysis of “The Lottery” Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” encases the ruthlessness of human interaction in a merely 3,738 words (Cellania). “The Lottery” starts by showing you a small town in America, in which the townspeople are gathering for their annual “Lottery” tradition, in which the story is named after. As the story continues the mood changes from seemingly positive and welcoming to a more suspicious and sinister motive. The story takes a disturbing turn and reveals that…

In Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery,” Tessie Hutchinson gets stoned to death, by her friends and family in the annual lottery of the village. Throughout the day emotions ran high and changed significantly. The future of every family relied on a single piece of paper with a solid black blotch, which left the small village on edge. After all the families were accounted for the lottery began, and lives were about to change for the worst. The Hutchinson’s were the unfortunate family of…

In many of her writings, Shirley Jackson uses adaptations of her life and personal journeys of alienation from a comfortable yet dysfunctional childhood, combined with the miseries of an unhealthy marriage while raising and projecting a happy family, "Life Among the Savages", which caused her devaluation by traditional male critics who had difficulty reconciling Jackson’s housewife status with her production of Gothic narratives (Hague), to the many riveting and haunting short stories, “The…

In the literary work "The Lottery” the author Shirley Jackson describes a tale that is shocking, inhumane, and disturbing. When it originally was released in the year of 1948 it is noted that she received hundreds of letters, but only thirteen spoke kindly to her (Shirley Jackson, 63-67). People of that time period did not know the meaning of the story and it frightened them. But even more disturbing, I believe, Jackson wanted emphasize the fact of the social evils that still exist in modern…

In “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson, a third person objective point of view is utilized throughout the entire story. The author applies this view point to show her perspective on traditions of society. As an outsider looking in, the author reveals to the reader the insensitivity and selfishness of humans to explain the blindness of society to outdated, barbaric traditions. The author avoids leading the reader into the minds of anyone in the village. We solely hear commentary and actions of the…

of paper for the lottery is one of the objects that Shirley Jackson uses to foreshadow the end of the story. The black box represents the tradition of the lottery in that village. It is even older than the oldest man in the village. Nobody in town really knows the history of the box except it was made from the original box pieces; nobody knows if the sacrifice even works but it remains. Even though “The black box grew shabbier each year,” (Jackson, 67) villagers are unwilling to replace it just…

Last week in our class we read and watched the short story The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. The story has a main character, Tessie Hutchinson, and her family, who “win” the lottery. This story takes place in a small village. The people there kept their lottery, even though they could have gotten rid of it, because they wanted to stick with their traditions of ritualistic violence. This tradition was first put into use because in the past there were human sacrifices in order to get good crops for…