The Lottery by Shirley Jackson is a thrilling masterpiece created in 1948. This short story starts off by welcoming clear sunny skies, green grass and children gathering stones at play. It allows the reader to positively accept this introduction without knowing it will later build on suspense and devastation. Soon after, children run off to meet with their families to await the annual “lottery”. They sacrifice one person from a single household to make sure they have a successful year of growing crops without any scientific evidence to account for this tradition. Everyone carefully draws out a paper from an old, almost falling apart black box. They usually try to get it over with as soon as possible because even though some of them don’t agree, it is the easiest way to forget about it and return to their every day lives. Like the end of a sentence, a black dot on the paper is utilized to mark the end of their existence. Jackson brilliantly utilizes situational irony, symbolisms, fear and tradition to express the dangers of conformity within every society.
Conformity is the willingness to accept society’s norms as your own in order to fit in with the group. By doing so, people are less likely to question or go against socially accepted behavior. This can become very challenging when it comes to tradition because it is difficult to stray away from ideas that have been embedded in people’s minds since they were born. Shirley Jackson used the black box to symbolize how certain traditions become obsolete, therefore, we should have an open mind to new ones and have the autonomy to decide what is right from wrong. In the story, it states that, “Every year after the lottery, Mr. Summers began talking again about a new box but, every year the subject was allowed to fade off without anything’s being done. The black box grew shabbier each year: by now it was no longer completely black but splintered badly along one side to show the original wood color, and in some places faded or stained”. This conveys the idea of conformity and how badly the village has failed at letting old traditions die.
The villagers choose to do nothing about it even if their hearts are splintered with fear and lives stained with the guilt of killing another person.
The author leaves the reader to wonder and evaluate the overall inhumanity, fear and devastation that surrounds us all in today’s society. Jackson purposefully didn’t state the exact location or year of this event because it can happen anywhere at any given moment. When it comes down to any type of “lottery” people are willing to sacrifice others and their own ideals in order to save themselves the trouble. Out of fear, people choose to not speak up against norms because they feel as if society won’t accept them and in return, negatively label them. It may seem easier to conform and align with traditions as opposed to challenge them but we hold the power to consider which traditions do the greatest good. Not everything that is old is wise and that leads me to end off with a great quote by Dwight D. Eisenhower, “ Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him”.
Works Cited:
Translation. (n.d.). Retrieved April 17, 2018, from https://www.quotes.net/quote/259
The Lottery at FullReads. (n.d.). Retrieved April 17, 2018, from http://fullreads.com/literature/the-lottery/
