Essay On The Lottery By Shirley Jackson

Tradition has a sense of importance in many cultures for multiple reasons. Tradition is known to bring people together and teach values for generations. In the story “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson it begins as a heartwarming story but soon takes a dark turn. The story takes place in a small village of about three hundred people where they hold an annual lottery that brings all the people of the village together in the square of the town. The lottery that they hold isn’t an ordinary lottery, it is one where whoever draws the winning slip is to be stoned to death by their family and others who live in the village. The theme is developed throughout the story where tradition is too important to get rid of no matter how bad it may be.
One way the village upholds the lottery is by making people believe that the crops will be much better after the ritual. The oldest man in the village who goes by Old Man Warner lived through Seventy Seven years of the lottery and still believed the tradition should still live on. He

The black wooden box has been put in use even way before Old Man Warner was born and it represented the tradition itself. People of the village wanted to change the box but it upset the others because it was too important to the tradition. It has been passed down for generations and symbolizes the “good” the tradition brings to the village. This black wooden box is so important because it was stated that “There was a story that the present box had been made with some pieces of the box that had preceded it, the one that had been constructed when the first people settled down to make a village here” (Jackson). The villagers hold such loyalty to this box because they were taught that this box symbolizes tradition and that with the lottery comes better living conditions. No one wanted to tamper with the tradition and the history of the box so they kept it the way it