Foreshadowing In The Lottery By Shirley Jackson

Edgar Allen Poe once said, “A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.” All authors use many different methods to create the mood in a story. In stories authors use many different methods to illustrate mood in a story, Shirley Jackson, author of “The Lottery” uses foreshadowing and setting to create the mood while W.W Jacobs uses sound and diction in his story “The Monkeys Paw.” Finally, Joan Aiken uses foreshadowing and motifs to create the mood in her story, “The Third Wish” Foreshadowing is often used to create a dark feeling by hinting to future events. In “The Lottery”, Shirley Jackson uses foreshadowing to set the dark, grimacing scene of the story. One of the examples is when Mrs. Hutchinson says “Thought we were going to have to start with you, Tessie” (2). This example shows mood because it gives an extra feeling to Tessie which makes you think of her as special. This is how she uses foreshadowing to create a dark, scary feeling. The setting is used to set the mood by either being dark or bright to create a mysterious or peaceful environment. In Jackson’s story, “The Lottery” she uses setting to create a very misleading story. She writes “The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day: the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass as richly green”

A notable example of this happens in Jacobs’s short story “The Monkeys Paw.” In his story, he writes “At the foot of the stairs the match went out, and he paused to strike another, and at the same moment a knock, so quiet and stealthy as to be scarcely audible, sounded on the front door” (98). The sound showed mood in the story because after the knock occurred the room fell silent and a dark and mysterious feeling over the room because no one expected a knock at that moment. This is just one example of how Jacobs can create the mood in a