Compare And Contrast Charles And The Lottery By Shirley Jackson

The short stories by Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery” and “Charles”, have notable similarities in building your curiosity but vastly different endings. “The Lottery”, is a story about a tradition of lottery selection passed on from generation to generation in a town and currently run by Mr. Summers. “Charles” is about a young boy named Laurie, who is starting kindergarten and wants attention from his parents. In both short stories, the author describes the characters, the themes, and the situations to create an illustration for the reader. Laurie and Mr. Summers are both portrayed as characters who want to push the boundaries of the community. The author made Mr. Summers a single man who organizes the lottery in which citizens pick slips

Who will win, what do they win? While in charge of the “lottery”, Mr. Summers doesn’t support its traditions and feels the town should end it like a few surrounding towns have recently done. To him, the black box represents death and bad traditions in the community. His community members think it 's “Bad enough to see young Joe Summers up there joking with everybody.” They fear the young people are the ones changing the traditions and ending this tradition will lead to other breakdowns in society. Mr. Summers is the one adult questioning the tradition. In Shirley Jackson 's other short story, “Charles” Laurie is trying to become an independent young man and wants to be different from the rest of his class. His way of being different is being mischievous. Laurie wants attention and to outshine his classmates, but at home he just wants to have good attention from his

Finally, in both of these short stories Shirley Jackson writes the first scene of the plots so differently and keeps the reader wanting to read the story. In “The Lottery”, Jackson starts off the short story by describing the town on June 27. He first describes the uneasiness of all the children. He writes, “School was recently over for the summer, and the feelings of liberty sat uneasily on most of them.” The students were worried that her family could lose a person. Although, most of the town was scared, there were the little boys who were excited to throw stones and had them stocked up. Jackson makes the youth represent a carefree life. The girls end up being too busy looking for guys to be scared of the black box. They were taught this day, as tradition and that they cannot break tradition. Jackson made the reader want to continue to find out why June 27 was so important. He gave a similar effect in “Charles”. Jackson sums up the entire meaning of the story in the first sentence. The narrator says, “The day my son Laurie started kindergarten, he renounced corduroy overalls with bibs and began wearing blue jeans with a belt; I watched him go off the first morning with the older girl next door, seeing clearly that an era of my life was ended, my sweet-voiced nursery-school tot replaced by a long-trousered, swaggering character who forgot to stop at the corner and wave good-bye to me.” Jackson stated that Laurie wants to become an individual. The