The short story “The Lottery” is a horror short story written by Shirley Jackson. It is about a small town hosting an annual lottery in the city center. Their lottery is a bit different than ours because instead of winning money, one lucky resident of this small New England town wins the prize of being stoned to death. The Lottery was written by Shirley Jackson who is mostly known for the horror and mystery genre. The Lottery is Jackson’s most famous story because of the fact that such a pleasant town took such a huge and dreadful turn for the worst (Source #7). Jackson used symbols, conflicts, and irony to take the reader by surprise.
One of the literary devices which Jackson uses is symbolism. The definition of the word symbol is “A figure of speech where an object, person, or situation has another meaning other than its literal meaning”(Source #8). The black box in a sense represents tradition. The box is used year after year no matter what the circumstances are they always use that same box. “Mr. Summers spoke frequently to the villagers about making a new box, but no one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box”, (Jackson pg.2). Nobody knows why they use the same box, or how they started using that particular box in the first place.” The black box grew shabbier each year”, so even though the box is in horrible condition the people still make no changes and just stick in little bits of paper to just cover up the blemishes and basically