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The Role Of Social Conformity In Shirley Jackson's The Lottery

950 Words4 Pages

“The Lottery,” a short story written by Shirley Jackson, takes place in a small, simple town. The main characters are Tessi, Bill, Old Man Warner, and Mr. Summers. This town is very strict to tradition. Annually this town holds a “Lottery”, is actually a drawing where people get stoned. Not everyone gets stoned to death. It depends on what paper you draw. They can’t get out of it, they are all forced. A major issue to this story is social conformity, this means that people do something because it seems like everyone else is doing the same thing. Social conformity really hurts people because it blocks people from seeing the real you, this happens basically throughout the entire story.
All the people arrived to the stoning. This scene especially shows social conformity because they know this is wrong, but everyone else goes so they think they have to also. Mrs. Hutchinson said, “And then I looked out the window and the kids was gone, and then I remembered it was the twenty-seventh and came-a-running.” This relates to social conformity because she quickly left her house to go to the townsquare. She only did this because she thought she had to.This also shows that some of the townspeople are used to this …show more content…

Just about everything that the villagers did in the story had to do with copying one another. My theme is that social conformity is a senseless behavior that keeps people from seeing the real you. IN all three of my scenes the villagers were doing things they didn’t have to do. They didn’t have to show up to the stoning, but they did. Some people didn’t want to stone Tessie, but they did because that’s what everyone did. Some people may have thought this behaviour was perfectly fine and there was no need for a change. They are 100% wrong. Social conformity isn’t ever okay because it really hurts people because they feel as if they cannot express their true selves without being

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