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Essay Comparing The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas And The Lottery

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The short stories The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin and The Lottery by Shirley Jackson have many similarities in their themes. They both explore isolation and punishment of one person for a group of many. In this paper, I will be analyzing the contrast between the themes of these two stories and how they are similar. They both also look at the theme of societal happiness and how they achieve it. The authors were from a similar time period, but the stories were written in different times of their lives, so there are impacts from the world that are reflected in both stories that will be discussed in this essay. Before we can look into the themes of each of these stories, we need to understand the time period and the authors' …show more content…

This all just shows how wonderful this utopian society is in their minds. The way they achieve this happiness is through the suffering of a singular child. Once you see this part of the story, the world does not look so great. We get drawn into the beauty of the festival and landscape, and when we see why they can have such happiness, you have to question if it's moral or not. The Lottery has a similar theme, but mainly revolves around traditions and the unwillingness to break them. They justify the killing of one of their neighbors by saying there has “ always been a lottery!”. Old man Warner was the voice of the older generation, saying anyone who does not participate in the ritual is “a pack of fools”. Jackson sheds light on how the older generations are the ones to keep the tradition alive because they have had to live through it multiple times before. Little Davey was handed a stone to kill Tessie Hutcheston and solidify the continuation of the lottery for future generations. Bailey Jackson also wrote this to criticize the followers in the town for not stepping up to stop the violence they are committing against their …show more content…

The lottery is similar in the way everyone is happy because they get to let out their pent up 5 aggression and anger one day a year, which helps keep the peace. (Bailey) This was their way of making a perfect society, but the other towns around them figured out sooner than them that this was not a perfect society, it was the opposite. The two stories criticize the rituals and traditions these stories show and also the people who blindly follow along with them without questioning them. We can learn a lot from these stories and ask important questions because of them. The ideals presented in front of us give us reasons to think harder about why we do the things we do, and to make us question authority when we are told to do something morally wrong. Work Cited: Bailey, T. (2014). SACRED VIOLENCE IN SHIRLEY JACKSON'S LOTTERY. British and American Studies, 20, 37-42, 2003. Retrieved from https://tccd.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/sacred-violence -shirley-jacksons-lottery/docview/1614409009/se-2 “Shirley Jackson Biography.” The Biography.com Website, A&E Television Networks, 2

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Furthermore, many of the characters express their uneasiness with change, as Mr.Warner says, “There has always been a lottery.” This indicates the importance of tradition to the villagers. The Lottery, demonstrates the complex feelings of a community engaging in a ritual event, in which they feel obligated to participate in. They appear to be experiencing a conflict with not breaking tradition with their fear of dying. Throughout this story there are numerous descriptions of characters dealing with anxiety, commitment, hope, and relief.

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A compare and contrast fiction essay on two short stories, “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson and “The Rocking Horse Winner” By D.H. Lawrence. The Lottery is a short story of a yearly ritual in which a small town casually draws one person’s name that will sacrifice their life by being stoned to death to ensure bountiful harvest. The Rocking Horse Winner is a fictional story about a woman who is obsessed with money, she shows no love or attention to her family, she thinks her husband is unlucky and her son Paul only wants to be loved by his mother, he hopes to change his mother’s mind in order to gain her love by becoming lucky.

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“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, is a short story expressed through the theme of apathy, when the community feels no emotion for anyone, that a ritual is more important than a human being, mob mentality, and hypocrisy which is prevalent within the townspeople. It may help learning more about Shirley Jackson to better understand why she wrote such a horrific story like, “The Lottery.” Shirley Jackson moved into a small town, Bennington, Vermont, where she wasn’t accepted within her town which shows she was thinking how cruel people can be. Not being accepted is not the same as being stoned or killed, but it has the capacity for cruelty. Through this, Shirley Jackson is suggesting that we need to examine ourselves and our actions carefully and live our lives consciously instead of

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Individual suffering is evident in Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery”, a theme also taken up by author Ursula Le Guin in her story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”. The theme of an individual person taking on the responsibility of society to suffer for the rest of civilization to live in happiness is a similarity between the two short stories. The difference is the realization of why that one individual has to suffer. In both stories, the authors use a scapegoat for the happiness of their community.

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Outline THESIS: The stories “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson and “The Rocking-Horse Winner” by D.H. Lawrence have some parts of the stories going to the same way. The difference is based on the three major areas in examining any story are the character, plot, and setting. I. The character in both stories ending with the tradition.

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Caden Newville 3/20/2024 Mrs. Spurlock English 1B. Midterm Writing Assignment: Compare and Contrast. The short stories The Lottery and The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas places the reader in a dystopian society where there are some pretty wild rituals that are essentially existing due to complete fallacies, appeal to antiquity for The Lottery and appeal to ignorance in The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. These are quite dark and contain death and abuse; however they also contain a lot of symbolism. Since these are rituals or society norms, they contain a lot of symbolism, and some simple details are extremely important to the plot.

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The short story “The Lottery” written by Shirley Jackson, the plot in the story that it only gives people an account of drawing lots to determine the winner who shall be stoned to death for harvest. However, we get a deep impression of the characters and their fate after reading the story. Jackson indicated a prevalent theme, the indirect of characterization and using symbolism and irony to modify this horror story. The Allegorical story of “ The Lottery” is often regarded as a satire of human behavior and social institutions, and exemplifies some of the central themes of Jackson’s fiction, including the victimization of the individual by society, the tendency of people to be cruel, and the presence of evil in everyday life.

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The fictional stories “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson and “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula K LeGuin are about one person sacrificing their life for the sake of others. “The Lottery” and “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” both reflect punishment in a conflicting way, through their setting, society, and morals. First of all, in“The Lottery” it consist of a small farming community where they work together in a warm and joyful setting. The author, Shirley Jackson gives the example by saying, “was clear and sunny, with fresh warmth of a full-summer day”(Jackson,1). This story provides a sense of a smaller, closer community, that has poverty issues which the town has a way of resolving.

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Throughout centuries, traditions and rituals have had the ability to control one’s behavior. In Shirley Jackson’s, “The Lottery”, she tells the reader of a small village. On the surface, this community may seem relatively normal. However, despite the picturesque appeal, this falsely serene village has a distinct deceitful flaw. On June 27th, every year, a lottery takes place.

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The Lottery itself represents a primal example of loss of innocence; portrayed through the young boys who gather at the town square to collect rocks for the horrors soon to follow. An illustration of how traditions can lose their true meanings and come to represent violence and warfare. Furthermore, “The Lottery” also represents the decaying characteristics of traditions, as symbolized by the town’s black box, in this case where every year, someone’s name is drawn out of the black box and they are stoned to death, by other members who may or may not end up to be family. Nonetheless, it ends up to be the villagers who

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While real life traditions are rarely so extreme, Jackson’s exaggerated fictional example emphasizes her point to great effect. By the end of the story, the audience is convinced that the town is wrong to uphold the lottery tradition, but Jackson is not really writing about a lottery; she is writing about how damaging it can

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Many people would die to win the lottery; in the short story “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson you would do anything NOT to win this lottery. This annual lottery reveals the negative aspects of this town’s Tradition, Savagery, Barbarism, and cold-heartedness. In this paper I will show why this town blindly follows these customs, not because it’s a tradition but because of the accepting wickedness that can be shown. Why does the town follow this foolish tradition? Throughout “The Lottery” the narrator tells that the people do not remember how the lottery began, and that some of the older people believe the lottery has changed over the years, that now people just want to get it over with as fast as possible.

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Its human nature to turn a blind eye to injustice inflicted into others. In the ‘’The Lottery’’ by Shirley Jackson, the author tells a complex story about how a simple lottery took place in a small town changing the lives, and fates of its inhabitants. Jackson main focus in the story is Feminism Criticism to illustrated the misogynistic views in ‘’The Lottery’’. In the story, the author uses the treatment of the females characters against its male counter parts to illustrate how women are view as second-class citizens, and how disrespected, and stereotypical they are. An example of this is showed in the very beginning of the story, where Jackson writes ‘’ against the raids of the other boys.

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In the 1940's, males are the absolute dominant gender in society. Shirley Jackson's famous short story “The Lottery”, shows exactly that. This short story portrays the critique of the dominance of patriarchy in past societies, as well as showing just how easily it is to blindly follow a ritual or tradition, even though they do not know very much about the origin of this tradition, they continue to follow it for the sole purpose of it having been around for such an extended period. Those who blindly follow tradition are more willing to commit an act of mass violence, simply for the sake of a tradition.

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