The story starts by introducing The Lottery, a special event that takes place each year in a small town, hosted by Mr. Summers. It was a rule and tradition that all the people in the town must participate in The Lottery. The first round of The Lottery takes place, as each representative of each family takes turns drawing from the black box. A few people converse about how other villages had already given up on The Lottery. Old Man Warner, the oldest man in town, ridicules those villages, exclaiming how it has always been a common tradition. Bill Hutchinson had drawn the slip with the black dot for the first round. His wife, Tessie, complains about how Mr. Hutchinson didn’t have enough time to draw the slip. The other townspeople, however, urge her to proceed. They proceed into the next round, where each individual from the Hutchinson family draws from the wooden box to determine their fate. Out of the five members of the Hutchinson family, including Bill, Tessie, and their three young children, one of them would draw out the slip with the black dot. The three children reveal their slips first, and all of them are shown to be empty. Bill Hutchinson’s result was the same. He then moves over to Tessie and forces the paper out of her hand. He opens the slip and shows it to everyone, revealing the black dot in the middle of the paper. Soon, all the townspeople start to make their way to the piles of stones they have prepared beforehand. Someone even gives her son, little Davy Hutchinson, a stone to throw. Tessie is hit by a stone on the side of her head, and the crowd closes in upon her.
Throughout the short story, the brutal nature of The Lottery highlights the influence of mob mentality and blind conformity to the community. As the villagers who participate in the annual lottery give in to tradition and conformity, they gradually lose their human dignity and civilized manners. Many people in the village realize the cruelty of The Lottery, especially young adults, who are not too old to take the ‘tradition’ seriously, and not too young to misunderstand the nature of this event. However, despite this, no one is brave enough to stand up against the crowd, because it is human nature to follow the steps of everyone else and conform to the majority. To them, as long as they weren’t the ones standing in the middle of the town square, holding a slip of paper with a black spot in the middle, it wouldn’t matter to them. As long as they weren’t Tessie Hutchinson, they had no need to stand up and address their beliefs to the crowd. This in fact may be the thoughts of nearly everyone in the village, including Old Man Warner. In a conversation with a neighbor during The Lottery, Old Man Warner comments on the stupidity of young adults when he learns that other villages have already given up on this tradition: “‘Pack of crazy fools,’ he said. ‘Listening to the young folks, nothing's good enough for them. Next thing you know, they'll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work anymore, live that way for a while. Used to be a saying about Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.’” (Jackson, 6). While one reason Old Man Warner might consent to The Lottery would be of tradition, another reason would be because he was never the one who drew the slip with the black spot. As the oldest man in the village, he never bothered to care about the cruel nature of this event, because he only cared about his own fate. And like the majority of the village, he couldn’t care less about other people’s lives and only cared about his own.
Besides being a cruel and brutal event, The Lottery also desensitizes the people in the village by creating an illusion to promote violence in the community. Over the course of the story, multiple events suggest the desensitization of The Lottery to the people in the village. The event takes advantage of humanity’s natural instinct to follow the majority and believe the same things other people believe. Through the conversation between Old Man Warner, the oldest man in the village, and Mr. Adams the readers can understand the origin of The Lottery: “‘Next thing you know, they'll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live that way for a while. Used to be a saying about Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon. First thing you know, we'd all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns. There's always been a lottery.’” (Jackson, 6). However absurd this saying sounded to both the villagers and bypassers, the people in the town choose to follow this tradition, and therefore carry out this brutal act. Even the names of the characters in this story suggest the true nature of The Lottery: Tessie, short for “Theresa”, means harvest, while the literal meaning of “bill” in the name of Bill Hutchinson is to pay back. The two names together would be “to pay back for harvest”, meaning that Tessie will be the price for a good harvest. To the villagers, the person chosen to get stoned to death each year in The Lottery is treated as a ‘sacrifice’. Their continuous belief of this being a justifiable reason for such brutality desensitized everyone, as it passed down from generation to generation. The result of this desensitization can be found evident through Old Man Warner’s character: he is so used to this annual Lottery that he doesn’t find it surprising anymore, and even comments on the other villages for giving up on this tradition. The Lottery makes the people in the village, including the children, believe that the event was fair, by creating an illusion of ‘justice’ and using tradition as an excuse for brutality.
There are large amounts of random and unknown factors within the story, whether it is in the structure of the story overall or the annual lottery event as a whole. The results of the lottery is completely random, and so unlike some other story structures, it is much more surprising to the readers. Similar to the readers having no clue who will draw out the slip of paper with the black spot at the end of The Lottery, some other short stories are structured in the same way. For instance, the Monkey’s Paw is about a protagonist receiving a magical item that will grant the owner three wishes, but all three will lead to horrifying endings, due to the spirit of this item being angry that they were aroused from their resting place. When the protagonist wishes for two hundred pounds to pay off their loan that day, her son dies in an accident and the company he worked for pays them two hundred pounds for compensation. The second wish was to bring the son alive from the dead again, but his figure in the shadows, still fresh from the grave, by the doorway frightens both his parents. Although this result already shows how randomized the monkey’s paw can be, the readers are still perplexed by what the final wish could be. Surprisingly, the final wish was made in a hurry, and it was to let the son go away again, out of fear that there would be more consequences to the second wish. Similar to The Monkey’s Paw, the result of The Lottery is completely unknown to the readers: “Bill Hutchinson went over to his wife and forced the slip of paper out of her hand. It had a black spot on it, the black spot Mr. Summers had made the night before with the heavy pencil in the coal company office.” (Jackson, 9). Even more surprisingly, would be the final fate of Tessie, the ‘winner’ of The Lottery. Because of the literal meaning of modern-day lotteries, the readers automatically believe that The Lottery would also be a pleasant event, that includes giving out money to the winner. However, the fate of the ‘winner’ in this lottery was the exact opposite, and they would be stoned to death like Tessie. Many suspenseful elements are included in this horror novel, with one being the randomness of persecution for the results of the lottery. The story contains multiple unknown factors, creating suspense and surprising the readers with an unexpected ending.
“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson explores the tradition of the Lottery, which takes place in a small town each year. Throughout the short story, the horrifying and brutal nature of the tradition is revealed to readers. However, the true horror of the story doesn’t lie in The Lottery itself, but in the blind conformity of the people in the village. The people would blindly conform to tradition and the majority of the community, even though they all knew the brutality and cruelty of The Lottery. People like Old Man Warner would much rather follow the tradition; others simply conform to the majority of the village. Only people who stand in the perspective of Tessie would realize how cruel the tradition and the nature of the townspeople were, in reality — but at that time, it would be too late to change. ‘Tradition’ is used as an excuse for brutality in The Lottery, and desensitizes the villagers by creating an illusion of justice to promote violence. The randomness of persecution within this novel also creates suspense, which highlights and emphasizes the brutal truth behind the Lottery and humanity.
Works Cited
Jackson, Shirley. “The Lottery”, Google Documents PDF
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