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The Lottery Theme Essay

492 Words2 Pages

The Lottery Theme Analysis Rules are made to be followed. That is why they are set in place, but what happens when the rules cause unneeded harm? In Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery A village has a lottery, but it is not a typical one. In this lottery, everyone in the village gathers and the heads of families all draw paper from a black box. The family that has a paper with a dot on it draws again and the person with the dot then gets beaten to death by the other villagers throwing rocks at them. The Lottery’s theme is that blindly following rules and tradition can be bad. The townspeople had no other reason for the lottery besides that it was “tradition”. The lottery was a very old tradition. “The original paraphernalia for the lottery had been lost long ago, and the black box...had been put into use even before Old Man Warner, the oldest man in town, was born”. No one wanted to change what had been going on for a long time. Mr. Summers, the person in charge of the lottery, even told people to make a new black box because of how shabby theirs was, but no one wanted to change tradition. None of the townspeople remembered why they had the lottery; they just did, and that caused someone to needlessly lose their life. …show more content…

Jackson, the author, starts the story using imagery talking about the “...clear and sunny [morning], with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green.”. Then Jackson goes into the real story, and she makes everything mundane from then on. She starts including small, unimportant details, and elongates what’s going on to show what this event does to the moods of the people and what gloom it brings with it. No one in the town liked the lottery, but they all still thought it was crucial because of the tradition that came with it. This ends with a person being murdered by her own town and is a very sad event that wasn’t

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Within this source it has a list of sub headings that cover symbolic meaning of the lottery, the lottery box, stoning and considering the authors background. The sub heading about the author Shirley Jackson provides me with some very crucial information around the long standing traditions of what the whole story really meant and the back ground of the author when she wrote this short story. Ironically Shirley Jackson was a women during the 1948 period in America. Which began to part the puzzle for me on the ideologies used in the story that contrasted America at that present time. For e.g. whether it was segregation, the lack of free voting rights or any of the many other traditions which still exist primarily because they have always existed.

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Summers declared the lottery open. There were lists to make up- of heads of families, heads of households in each family, members of each household in each family.” If there really is so much fussing to be done for the lottery to be declared open in the first place, a logical reason is that it is a tradition. To further the point, the text says, “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 (p. 16, lines 74-77).” This goes back to the point that the town doesn’t want to upset the tradition because they don’t even want to get rid of the black box.

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Did national media news outlets ignore to report the initial death of Freddie Gray and the peaceful protests and merely pay attention and cover the violence in Baltimore? On April 27th, when the peaceful protests turned violent in Baltimore Fox News, CNN and MSNBC jumped on the footage. During the two days of violent riots, coverage by these networks grew 162 percent compared to when the Baltimore protests were peaceful a few days earlier. In addition, according to the Nielsen ratings “on the night of the violent protests on April 28, the ratings of all three channels surged in the key news demo... Compared with the previous Monday, CNN experienced a 574 percent increase, Fox News a 121 percent increase and MSNBC a 77 percent increase.”

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The short story “The Lottery” is written by Shirley Jackson. This story takes place in a small village where everybody knows each other. In this story all the villagers gather around town for their annual lottery. Everyone in the village is compelled to follow this tradition even if the outcome ends up with someone dying. In “The Lottery”, Shirley Jackson uses conflict, theme, and irony to develop this suspenseful short story.

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“The Lottery’s” opening lines read: “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 was richly green. ”(Jackson 309). From this line, one can conclude that Jackson is trying to portray the village as a quaint and nice place where townsfolk gather, and no harm occurs. However, this strays far from the truth. As the story continues, the gathering abruptly changes and ultimately leads the townspeople to commit violence and murder.

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It was almost a way of life and if it was not followed there were dire consequences. The story starts to become ironic when specified what the lottery really means to them. A lottery, in any other community, is seen as a chance to win rewards that are in your favor. Within this town, it’s a chance to murder a single person every year. The main idea Jackson make in “The Lottery” is that people can come to together to perform this terrible act and then completely forget about.

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The Lottery is a story by Shirley Jackson. It is about a town that has a type of stoning event called the lottery. It is basically like gambling with your life. Each person has to pull out a slip of paper out of a black box. There are enough slips for each member of the town.

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The Lottery itself represents a primal example of loss of innocence; portrayed through the young boys who gather at the town square to collect rocks for the horrors soon to follow. An illustration of how traditions can lose their true meanings and come to represent violence and warfare. Furthermore, “The Lottery” also represents the decaying characteristics of traditions, as symbolized by the town’s black box, in this case where every year, someone’s name is drawn out of the black box and they are stoned to death, by other members who may or may not end up to be family. Nonetheless, it ends up to be the villagers who

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While real life traditions are rarely so extreme, Jackson’s exaggerated fictional example emphasizes her point to great effect. By the end of the story, the audience is convinced that the town is wrong to uphold the lottery tradition, but Jackson is not really writing about a lottery; she is writing about how damaging it can

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The Symbolism of The Lottery One big symbol that the short story is discreet about is the black box that is repeated throughout the short story symbolizes fear to adults which could affect even the most innocent. The black box appears to be the only paraphernalia that is still being used in the tradition of having a lottery. Mr. Summers is the one who is running the lottery at the time. Mr. Summers is seen as a nice man, however, when he is introduced, he is seen with the black box. “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson is a short story that uses the black box as a symbol to convey an underlying message that when the power of a tradition is given to a person, it could lead a crumbling society.

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The tradition of the lottery has been carried out for so long in this village that nobody even knows the reason for its occurring in the first place and nobody questions it. When Old Man Warner, the oldest man in the village, is told about other villages giving up the tradition of the lottery, he says that they are, “[A] pack of crazy fools [...]. There [has] always been a lottery [...]” (Jackson, 4). There is no reason why there has always been a lottery except that every year on June 27th, they held the lottery.

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Charmain Baker-Deer ENC1102 Mar 02, 2018 Essay draft 1 Topic: What is the theme of “The Lottery”? “The Lottery” is about small town, with a population of three hundred people. Everyone from the village is subjected to participates in an annual ritual, where members are required to pick from a black box to determine their destiny. In “The Lottery,” Jackson highlights human kind capacity of victimizing violence and tradition to control the masses.

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At a time when basic religious beliefs and traditions were being questioned by academia, author Shirley Jackson penned a poignant attack against those who blindly accepted values and traditions in her short story, “The Lottery.” The Lottery is presented as an event that has always occurred throughout the region's history without any opposition. Nonchalantly, the entire village commits homicide at the finale. Finally, aspects of the traditional lottery evolved without notice or were forgotten by the villagers. Within “The Lottery,” author Shirley Jackson embeds the theme of blindly accepting traditions as illustrated by the actions of the villagers.

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This story still remains relevant in comparison to today. Simple towns people who speak to each other on a daily basis and joke around with each other all of the sudden turn around and kill one of their one. This story symbolized the change of heart within people when events go on. With various symbols, Shirley Jackson created the short story, The Lottery, to show society and what it has been and what it could be. One might even say that Jackson wanted to keep it in the mind of a ‘modern’ society that such things could happen again.

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They do not want to follow the other towns that had given up the lottery. The townspeople are apprehensive of transition because of the unknown factors. One of the examples in the story that shows their lack of willingness to change their customs is the battered black box they use for the lottery. It has been stained and the original color of the wood is shown on the side. Every year, Mr. Summers, who manages the lottery suggests to the villagers to get a new box.

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