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Similarities Between The Lottery And Harrison Bergeron

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The two short stories The Lottery and Harrison Bergeron are similar themes because they both question status quo and the tolerance of counterproductive social practices for the sake of obedience. In “The Lottery” there is a village that is blinded that they have maintained an old practice without even questioning its purpose or its rationale. The practice is there is only one winner of the lottery and that person is stoned to death. In “Harrison Bergeron” they want to be so equal that they make everyone wear handicaps so that no one can be stronger, smarter, or prettier than anyone else. The conditions are both cruel and senseless. Both these stories share similar aspects. In both the stories you see that these traditions lead to rebellion or …show more content…

In ‘The Harrison Bergeron” Harrison breaks out of his handicaps to become the ruler of humanity. In “The Lottery” Tessie does something similar to what Harrison did in “The Lottery”. Even though these stories are similar they do have some differences In “The Lottery” it is in a small rural town and it is in the past, but “Harrison Bergeron” is in a big city in 2081. Both of the stories are meant to say not everything has to be the same and not every tradition needs to be kept. Harrison was only trying to make a difference to help his community but instead he was punished and killed. The Lottery is killing off people for a tradition that no one knows why they keep, they just feel the needs to do it because it is a tradition and don’t want to change. The stories are similar because there is someone in each story who is trying to put an end to these horrible rules that is only harming them more in their society. The longer they keep these traditions and rules the longer people will break the and try to stop them, but by the time they can put and end to it they will kill or harm half of their community.

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Both the stories depict the theme of the dangers of blindly following traditions as it can lead to the demise if innocent people. In both stories, the townspeople aimlessly follow their annual traditions because they are accustomed to the event. In “The Lottery”, Mr. Adams

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Individuals are the building blocks of society, but they can’t dictate the way society flows. In the short stories “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson and “Harrison Bergeron,” by Kurt Vonnegut, and the theories of enlightenment philosophers, individuals can not change society. Tessie Hutchinson from “The Lottery,” tried to persuade her village that the tradition was wrong, but she faced death. While, Harrison from “Harrison Bergeron,” tried to overthrow society's ideas, through atrocious actions. The philosophers believed that the governors of society should be responsive and secure rights for the people.

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The View of Perception There are many unmistakable parallels between the two-short story’s “The Lottery” and “Barn Burning.” “The Lottery” is written by Shirley Jackson and takes place in a small town in America. The lottery is an annual ritual where all the families get together, the man of each family takes a paper with the possibility of that being marked which then means someone in the family will die. That is to say, a villager winning the lottery results in the other villagers stoning he or she to death. William Faulkner wrote the short story “Barn Burning.”

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368 Words | 2 Pages

The Lottery and Harrison Bergeron, both share common themes and differences in their stories. One would be that both societies claim theses “traditions give them unity and equality”. Another theme commonly shared is both stories show how people can be blind to tradition. Although these stories are similar they have their differences one being Harrison Bergeron tried dyeing like a martyr while Ms. Hutchinson died trying to save her own life. In both of theses stories society believes that their barbaric traditions bring them equality and unity.

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222 Words | 1 Pages

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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955 Words | 4 Pages

Harrison Bergeron written by Kurt Vonnegut and Searching For Sunshine written by Joan Aiken are very similar, and different at different parts of each story. They both had similar time periods. In Harrison bergeron, their happiness was taken away by the government. In Searching For Sunshine, their happiness is taken away by the weather. In these stories, all the characters that are oppressed try to come out of the oppression from either the government, or weather.

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329 Words | 2 Pages

The two story’s “The Lottery” And “First They Came”, have similar themes or messages. The lottery is about a small town in a fiction world that needs to keep up a tradition by having a lottery. But in this case winning the lottery is not a good thing. The poem First they came is about a man where everyone around him is being taken by the Nazis because they are either Jewish, Socialists, and the Unionists.

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“The Lottery” Interpretive Essay “The Lottery”, a short story by Shirley Jackson, is about a lottery that takes place in a small village. The story starts of with the whole town gathering in the town square, where Mr. Summers, the official, holds the lottery. After that, every family draws out of an old black box, and a certain family gets picked. Out of the certain family, one person gets picked as the unlucky “winner” of the lottery. In this short story, after the Hutchinson family gets drawn, Tessie Hutchinson is declared “winner” of the lottery.

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Compare and Contrast Name Trinity Morse “The Lottery” and Hunger Games Both “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins are about dystopian societies in which life and death events occur. They are similar in a way and not similar in a way. They are similar because this event happens once a year. In “The Lottery” the whole Village Square gets rocks and throws them at the winner they will throw the rocks until the winner is died. In The Hunger Games they get slips and put them in a jar and a special person with pull a girl and a boy from the jar.

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The themes of both stories deal with them blindly following tradition. In the story The Lottery, the villagers follow tradition in which it ends with stoning. The villagers systematically choose someone through a lottery and in the end the one chosen is stoned to death. The villagers forgot exactly why they do the lottery tradition but they follow it because it gives them a simple solution for the growing population and for a better harvest they believe, as mentioned by Old Man Warner, “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.” Similar to the

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1009 Words | 5 Pages

“The Lottery" is a verdict of depraved tradition of a community. The story surrounds a town where the lottery is drawn every year as a sacrifice ritual one 's life for a good fertile crop. The lottery rose up public opinions when it first published in 1948. It is a piece of Shirley Jackson in which she wrote about inhumanity and violence among human based on her real experience when she moved to a small town and was rejected by its people. Shirley Jackson always believed in sinful spirit within each individual self as her writing style portrayed the vicious side of her and people 's souls, “The dark current of awareness of evil that runs through her life and work seems too strong to have as its sole root the observance of suburban hypocrisy” (Judy Oppenhaimer).

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504 Words | 3 Pages

The Lottery is a story by Shirley Jackson. It is about a town that has a type of stoning event called the lottery. It is basically like gambling with your life. Each person has to pull out a slip of paper out of a black box. There are enough slips for each member of the town.

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801 Words | 4 Pages

The stories "The Lottery" and "The Hunger Games" are very similar to one another. Both stories show fear, sacrifice, and violence in some way. The government is corrupt and is not willing to stop deadly traditions that have gone on for too long. These traditions should have never started in the first place. In "The Lottery," citizens fear that they will no longer be able to grow crops as a result of not having this deadly game.

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205 Words | 1 Pages

The Lottery In this short story “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson we can see the theme of the duality of human nature. Tessie Hutchinson thinks the lottery is unfair. She claims that they didn't get through time. But everybody had the same chance and time.

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This story still remains relevant in comparison to today. Simple towns people who speak to each other on a daily basis and joke around with each other all of the sudden turn around and kill one of their one. This story symbolized the change of heart within people when events go on. With various symbols, Shirley Jackson created the short story, The Lottery, to show society and what it has been and what it could be. One might even say that Jackson wanted to keep it in the mind of a ‘modern’ society that such things could happen again.

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