Andrew McManus
Mrs. Erlbaum
Ela
January 17, 2023,
Blind Tradition
The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw once said “tradition will accustom people to any atrocity.” In Shirley Jackson's “ The Lottery” a small village blindly follows a crazy tradition that accustoms people to terrible and unreliable ways. “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson is a story about a terrible tradition when people of a small village follow a blind tradition that they don’t know anything about. The people of this small farming village have a lottery every year and they sacrifice one person to get stoned every year in a lottery drawing. In “ The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, Jackson utilizes innocent details to foreshadow the tragic ending. Shirley Jackson foreshadows the terrible events throughout the short story with the children playing with the stones. Shirley Jackson shows foreshadowing in the story throughout the kids when they make a pile of stones and they play around with them but playing around with them wasn’t their only purpose. “Dellacrroy’-- eventually made a great pile of stones in one corner of the square”(Jackson 1). This example of foreshadowing in this example is that the kid and all the other kids were making a pile of stones not just for playing but for killing the person. Without a doubt, Shirley Jackson foreshadows
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The villagers foreshadow almost everything at the start of the story and when they didn't want to be near anything or have anything to do with it. “The villagers kept their distance, leaving a space between themselves and the stool”(Jackson 1). The villagers show foreshadowing in this quote by how they don’t want to be near the stool because it is the box that chooses who will die and it will be very sad for some people. This confirms that Shirley Jackson uses foreshadowing in the villagers to direct the story to a tragic