The Lottery By Shirley Jackson Summary

In 1948, The New Yorker magazine introduced a fictional short story called The Lottery written by Shirley Jackson. The story begins by explaining the setting. It was a clear sunny morning with the warmth of a summer day, the flowers were blossoming and the grass was richly green. The lottery was held every year on June 27th. The villagers would gather at the town square, which was in between the post office and the bank. The lottery began at around 10 o’clock in the morning and took less than two hours so the villagers could get home in time for noon dinner. The town held 300 people so the people liked to refer their town as a village. After the setting has been introduced, they finally get into some action. All the villagers are gathering

The lottery has a few parts to it. First, Mr. Summers reads off the list of families. Then, the head of the households draw a slip of paper, the head of the household was usually the husband. Once one member of the family has the slip of paper folded up in their hands, Mr. Summers then allows everybody to open their slips of paper. The man (or sometimes woman) who has the slip of the paper with the big black dot on it puts their paper back in the box and their whole family goes up to draw. A man named Bill Hutchinson gets the slip of paper with the big black dot so his whole family goes up to draw. Tessie, his wife, offers her daughter and her son in law Don and Eva to draw with them. But, Mr. Summers disagrees with that idea because there’s a rule that states “Daughters draw with their husbands”. Once every person in the family has a slip of paper, they open them together, and whoever has the black dot, gets stoned to death. This village thinks of having one person sacrificed (stoned to death), will bring good crops. That’s why in the story Old Man Warner says “Lottery in June, Corn be heavy soon.” A theme throughout the story of The Lottery is power of

A difference between the movie and the book is how in the movie, the camera zoomed in on everybody's shaky hands and it zoomed in on Tessie’s face so we could see how scared she was. But in the story, we can only imagine this so we don’t get a very good detailed picture. Another difference is that Bill Jr. and Nancy’s reaction when they opened their papers. In the story it said something about how when Nancy and Bill Jr. had a smile when they saw that they had blank papers. But in the movies when they unfolded their papers, they looked like they were the two happiest people in the world. This is a major reason because it showed how selfish they were, like they didn’t know that now, one of their parents would have to die. Yet another major difference is that in the movie you see more of the stoning part. This is a major difference because in the movie you can see the blood and you can hear the screaming, yet in the story, you have to visualize this. The stoning was more brutal in the movie than the