The Lottery By Shirley Jackson: A Literary Analysis

Everyone has experienced loss in their life, it’s inevitable. Whether that’s losing the other half of a pair of socks or loss of a loved one. People can lose things that aren’t even physically there. They can lose control or their minds. It’s not uncommon to lose things, in fact, everyone loses at least one thing every day, and they might not even be aware of it. The hardest type of loss is most likely losing someone that was loved or cherished. That is the type of loss that can’t be found again. Though, some things people don’t know they lost or are losing someone until it’s too late. Similar to what happened to Tessie Hutchinson in “The Lottery.” Villagers crowd around the town square to draw cards from a black box that determine who gets violently stoned. Everyone that draws a piece of paper from the box has the same chance

In the text it describes how, “Mr. Summers spoke frequently to the villagers about making a new box, but no one liked to even upset as much tradition as was represented by the black box” (Jackson 1). Even though the box is old and the always talk about a new one, the villagers are too scared to replace it. This helps the readers understand more about the ritual and the box. It also clarifies what they do with the box when it’s not in use. “The rest of the year, the box was put away, sometimes one place, sometimes another; it had spent one year in Mr.Graves’s barn and another year underfoot in the post office. And sometimes it was set on a shelf in the Martin grocery and left there” (Jackson 1). This makes the readers wonder why they treat the box with such respect during the ritual but the rest of the year, they don’t seem to have as much regard for it. By using flashbacks and the background information the author, Shirley Jackson, symbolizes the black box as death and