The Lottery

Shirley Jackson’s story, “The Lottery” is ironic. The story begins with a calm description of a sunny day. It describes the flowers, the weather and the people in the village. This village was very small made up of only three hundred people. It was a ritual every year around the same time that the village participated in a lottery that took less then two hours. The story describes all the procedures that were necessary to complete this lottery. The lottery was conducted by Mr. Summers. It was necessary that all the family members of the village participated, from the youngest one to the oldest ones. Characters that are seen during the story are Mr. and Mrs. Delacroix, Mr. and Mrs. Hutchinson and old man Warner. The lottery was called out alphabetically which meant that the family whose last name began with an A was to go first and pick up their lottery tickets, then the family whose last name began with a B and so on and so forth.

We begin seeing something weird during the story when old man Warner begins to talk about the neighboring village and how they want to stop the ritual of the lottery. Old man Warner replies saying, “pack of crazy fools.” He didn’t understand why anyone would want to stop this tradition that had been going on since their ancestors. Finally, after all the families were called up everyone began to search around looking to see who had gotten the lottery ticket. It was Bill Hutchinson. The story’s mood begins to change. Mrs. Hutchinson says, “it isn’t fair.” This is peculiarly weird because where we live the lottery is a good thing. To win the lottery is one out a million chances, only if your lucky will you win this lottery. On the contrary in this village the winners of the lottery where scared. Finally at the end of the story we see that the prize of the lottery was someone’s life. To win the lottery meant to die. Who ever had gotten the ticket a second time would be stoned to death. In my particular case I would hate to live in this village. No one was held captive in this village, nor where they held at gun point to stay. But the reality is that no one ever thinks its going to be them. When they played this game they wouldn’t think that they were the one’s who were going to die because they figured that there were so many family’s that they wouldn’t be unfortunate enough to pick out the lottery ticket with their names on it.

I found this story to be ironic but very good. Twists at the end of a story are always good.