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Comparing The Lottery And Imagine There's No Heaven

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The tradition of following particular notions and dogmas in our culture shape our role as individuals in society. In Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” we are introduced to the destructive influence that unchallenged or unquestioned dogma has on an entity's life and death in a community. In this paper I will engage in textual analysis with the purpose of demonstrating and comparing how Salman Rushdie’s outlooks of organized religion and its effect on society in his essay, “Imagine there’s No Heaven” compares to those implied in Jackson’s short story. “The Lottery,” conveys the argument of the endangerment in thoughtlessly following rituals in cultural society. In Rushdie’s essay he perceives these traditional followings of dogmatic
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Tradition is a theme found in both the short story “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson and the play Antigone by Sophocles. In both stories tradition is used as a tool to force people to conform to the “norm” of society. In “The Lottery”, the people of the town revolve around their annual lottery. Everyone is quick to help each other get ready for the event and also show no remorse for the end of the ritual. Nobody objects to the continuation of the lottery, although Mr. Adams brings up the rumor that a nearby village were talking about giving up the lottery but he was quickly shut down by Old Man Warner.

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The Lottery is a short story about a town of people that will crowd and all the men will get a slip of paper all the paper is blank… besides one and that one has a black dot, so a lucky person will get it and if they have a kid older than 16 they have play this game, anyway the winner will get a “prize”. The Lottery story and The Lottery movie have many things that were different. The Lottery story is different from The Lottery movie by where it is located and where the event took place, such as in the story they were sacrificing someone in a large field while in the movie they were stopped by the building. If they didn’t have the building in the way she could have lived longer while if they did she would have died sooner.

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Heaven Looks a Lot Like the Mall by Wendy Mass follows an ordinary sixteen year old girl named Tessa on an extraordinary adventure. When slow reflexes during a PE dodgeball game suddenly land Tessa at heaven's doors, she's surprised to find out "heaven" looks a lot like her local mall. Tessa is lead to the lost and found, where she receives a bag containing several obscure items, each with an important meaning. As Tessa combs through her memories of the past and has her life replayed before her eyes, she realizes why her life unfolded the way it did and how each memory became a building block for who she was. Through witty verses and unique style, Mass tells the tale of a typical girl who finds herself while discovering what makes life worth

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