How the ending sheds a new light on the significance of the title in ‘The Flowers’ and ‘The Lottery’. In Alice Walker’s ‘The Flowers’, a ten-year-old girl called Myop goes for a walk in the woods while picking flowers, when she suddenly finds a dead body. In Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’, the villagers of a small community are holding the annual town lottery and Mrs. Hutchinson picks the winning lot. Both stories have special endings. These endings give interesting information and in that way give the title a whole new significance. In ‘The Flowers’, Myop is picking nice flowers while the sun is shining. When she’s returning home, she suddenly discovers the body of a dead man. There isn’t much emotion described, she lays down her flowers …show more content…
One of the few things that have changed is that they used to have chips of wood and now paper slips. These slips are in a black box that “grew shabbier each year” (p. 45, l. 53) but “no one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box” (p. 45, l. 47-48). The villagers “had done it so many times that they only half listened to the directions” (p. 46, l. 60-61) and “although [they] had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones” (p. 45, l. 42-43). They don’t know a lot about how the ritual originated, but they blindly preserve it anyway. To conclude, both ‘The Flowers’ and ‘The Lottery’ have endings that bring inspiration to look otherwise at the title. ‘The Flowers’ actually represent the character’s innocence or childhood and ‘The Lottery’ symbolises an ancient ritual of the old generation that new generations have been preserving carelessly for decades. So, a title can give the reader a hint what the story is going to be about, but it’s always possible that by the end of the story that title gets a new and more symbolic value or meaning, as these two short stories