Examples Of Malpractice In The Lottery By Shirley Jackson

Have you ever seen a current events article headline, which shows some problems happening in the world, and completely ignored it? In the fiction book “The Giver” by Lois Lowry, a boy named Jonas, who lives in a community where everything is the same, gets transmitted memories about how the world actually is. In the horror short story “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, a village hosts a lottery each year where the winner gets stoned to death. In “The Lottery” and “The Giver”, Jackson and Lowry use Jonas and Tessie's character development to demonstrate how humans ignore malpractice and wrongdoings until they realize how the wrongdoing applies to them.

In “The Giver”, Lois Lowry uses Jonas’s character development to demonstrate how humans ignore

An example of this is how at the beginning of the short story, Tessie said “Clean forgot what day it was,”(Jackson 5) to Mrs. Delacroix, “and they both laughed softly.”(Jackson 5), and at the end of the book, Tessie said “It isn’t fair,” (Jackson 75) as “A stone hit her on the side of the head.”(Jackson 75). These quotes prove how at the beginning of the story, Tessie was not acting against the lottery, and was peacefully laughing, but at the end of the story, when Tessie realized SHE was going to get stoned, she started to protest against the lottery. This demonstrates that Tessie did not care about the lottery until she realized how the lottery impacted her. Another example that indicates this theme in “The Lottery” is how when Tessie was enduring getting stoned to death, “The children had stones already. And someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles.”(Jackson 75), and “ Mrs. Delacroix selected a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands and turned to Mrs. Dunbar.”(Jackson 75). This shows that even though everyone knows the dangers of the lottery, and even though they know this could happen to them, they still participate in the activity of stoning people picked to death, and they don’t care who is getting stoned to death, whether it’s a family member or friend. If they