Outdated And Modernized In Shirley Jackson's The Lottery

Outdated and Modernized In Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”, the author combines outdated rituals with modern society that question moral grounds. Jackson’s intention was to inform readers about a society of people and how their culture and beliefs effected their decisions in life. In this short story we discover many uses of foreshadowing and irony, to explain and understand the villages’ traditions. We will uncover the many uses of irony and why Jackson intentionally deceives her readers of “The Lottery”. The setting in “The Lottery” is placed in a small town of about three hundred citizens in Virginia. Jackson places the setting in a quiet town with the perception of regular people to take away the assumption or prediction that the town was full of crude behavior. The time frame was right at the beginning of summer, kids getting out of school, families being together and the community as a whole coming together to participate in a yearly ritual. “School was recently over for the summer, and the feeling of liberty sat uneasily on most of them…” (242)
The first use of foreshadowing that Jackson inconspicuously slips into the reading is

However, when it is brought up by younger members of the community that some villages have given up “The Lottery” elders such as Old Man Warner stress that “There’s always been a lottery”, he says, “Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to go back to living in caves…” (246) Jackson’s use of irony in this part of the story is quite contradictive because she has an older gentleman from an earlier generation who has participated in the lottery for as long as he can remember and argues that seizing participation in the lottery would be comparable to going back in time, even though the lottery itself is an outdated