Good Country People And The Veldt

Communities are present in both real life and in literature. They are almost always beneficial, yet there are some negative communities. These negative communities can be very detrimental to those inside them. The communities looked at are from the short stories Good Country People, by Flannery O’Connor, The Veldt, by

Ray Bradbury, and The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. Although often supportive, communities can also be a negative environment, like in the short stories, where they can be oppressive, pressure one to fit in, and create immense amounts of ostracism.

Communities can be very oppressive, especially to those who disagree with the ethics of those in the community. The oppression of people’s actions, speech, and even thoughts that happens

This nursery oppresses the kids by holding their minds captive, making them addicted to it’s crystal walls, not wanting to do anything but sit in there all day long.

It oppresses the parents by not letting them change what is being shown on it’s walls, which causes them to resent the parlor and what it has done to their kids. Another example of oppression in the communities found in short stories occurs in Shirley

Jackson’s The Lottery. Every year the town conducts a mandatory lottery involving all it’s members. That is where the similarities to any other real-life lottery ends. The

‘winner’, if you could call them that, gets stoned by the entire town. When someone points out that some other towns are stopping their lottery, Old Man Warner exclaims

“Pack of crazy fools… Listening to the young folks, nothing 's good enough for them…

There 's always been a lottery” (Jackson 27). The people in this town are being oppressed by a tradition much older than any of them. Yet they are also oppressing themselves by continuing with the barbaric process of randomly picking one member of the community each year to stone. Oppression in a community creates a

Ostracism can be present in a community, either directed at people inside the community or at those not in the community. In Ray Bradbury’s short story The Veldt, the children are addicted to the house’s nursery. According to the psychologist the parents have come asses the situation, he tells the them that “You 've let this room and this house replace you and your wife in your children 's affections, This room is their mother and father, far more important in their lives than their real parents… and now you come along and want to shut it off... no wonder there 's hatred here” (Bradbury 8).

The room has caused the children to ostracize the parents in the house. They do not want to spend time with the parents, instead they want to stay in the nursery from sunrise to sundown. When the parents threaten to shut it off, the kids throw a huge tantrum, begging for it to be turned on again. They eventually use the nursery to kill their parents. The house, more specifically the nursery, engrossed the kids so much they are driven to kill their parents, for fear of losing it. Ostracism in communities can drive people to do horrible things. In Flannery O’Connor’s Good Country People, Hulga is ostracized by others because she is a very anti-social amputee. Her