Hudson Dials ENG 105 Professor Andrew Goforth 8 March 2024 Analysis: “The Lottery” and its themes. “The Lottery” is a short story about a small town of about three-hundred people that has a tradition of hosting a raffle to determine which person within the town will die. The tradition has been around for a long time, and according to one of the oldest people in town, more than seventy-seven of them have occurred and are currently hosted by Mr. Summers, who is one of the most powerful people in town. The townspeople are anxious about the raffle, but are complicit in the tradition. After the Hutchinson’s family are drawn in the raffle, Mrs. Hutchinson, or Tessie starts to vocally state how unfair and evil the lottery is, but after being the …show more content…
In the story there are a lot of clues that say that the lottery is about tradition, like the lottery itself. The lottery is a tradition that “The original paraphernalia for the lottery had been lost long ago, and the black box now resting on the stool had been put into use even before Old Man Warner, the oldest man in town, was born” Paragraph 5: Line 1. According to another statement by Old Man Warner “Seventy-seventh year I been in the lottery,” Paragraph 14: Line 17. The two quotes show that the tradition of the lottery in the town outlives the oldest member of the town. The town seems like it is averse to changing the lottery, due to the length of time they have been actively doing the lottery. Since the town has been actively doing the tradition for at least seventy-seven years, some of the people think that society cannot function without having the lottery. When Mr. Adam said that a town from the north stopped doing the lottery, Old Man Warner called them fools and said “Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody works any more, live that way for a while.” paragraph 12: Line 1. The quote shows how important the lottery is for him, and how he does