“The most violent element in society is ignorance.“(Emma Goldman) The short story “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson is about a small town that holds an annual lottery to decide who out of the town’s people gets sacrificed to insure the crops grow. No one in the community questions this tradition, willingly killing a citizen yearly. In her work ‘The Lottery’, Jackson uses foreshadowing, suspense and symbolism to illustrate how a single life’s value is decreased in favour of preserving the supposed well-being of the rest of the civilization. Foreshadowing is used broadly in The Lottery too show the violent reality of the community. Before the lottery begins a group of men watching their children are talking, telling stories and when a joke was …show more content…
When the community gets together for the lottery they pick white slips of paper randomly out of a box. If you pull a slip with a black dot on it means that one of your family members must succumb to their death. The white slips of paper symbolize the equality throughout all of the citizens the fact that any one of them come to terms with the same fate. It represents the inescapable death and shows that while the lottery is gruesome it is fair. When Tessie Hutchinson is chosen to be sacrificed she realizes how horrifying the whole situation is and screams out “It wasn’t fair!” still believing that they didn’t give her husband enough time to pick a paper slip (5). Mrs. Graves says what the rest of the community is thinking, “ All of us took the same chance.” Showing that every citizen is equal in this situation (5). Furthermore, both the black dot on the paper slips and the black box used to hold the paper slips during the lottery both symbolize something grimmer. The dark colour represents the death one citizen must face, the box itself simulates a coffin, it is a dark box that holds the cruel fate for a poor soul. The box also speaks for the fading tradition of the lottery. While this town continues to hold the annual sacrifice other communities have given up this practice. The box is “no longer completely black, but splintered badly along one side” (2). It is in terrible shape showing how this society is