Theme Of Blindly Accepting Traditions In The Lottery By Shirly Jackson

Within “The Lottery,” author Shirly Jackson embeds the theme of blindly accepting traditions as illustrated by the actions of the villagers. For example, the Lottery is presented as an event that has always occurred throughout the region's history. Likewise, the author states multiple times that parts of the traditional Lottery have changed unnoticed by the villagers. Finally, the “murder” of Tessie Hutchinson is nonchalantly committed by the entire village. To start off, a brief history of the lottery is given to the reader which quickly implants the idea that the Lottery is an event that has occurred annually for hundreds of years within the village and surrounding area without any disruption. One example of this is the statement regarding how the original equipment for carrying out the Lottery was decades ago prior to the oldest villager's birth. In addition, Old Man

Towards the beginning of the story, Mr. Summers act of replacing the original wood chips with slips of paper is mentioned as being successful because the people had forgotten about most of the ritual. On the same line as this is another statement, “There had been, also, a ritual salute, which the official of the lottery had to use in addressing each person who came up to draw from the box, but this also had changed with time, until now it was felt necessary only for the official to speak to each person approaching.” In conjunction with the previous two examples is a statement at the end of the story: “Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones. These passages clearly illustrate that the villagers did not fully know what they were doing, but just followed along with the