Tradition In Shirley Jackson's The Lottery

“The Lottery,” written by Shirley Jackson, starts in what seems to be an ordinary, small town with ordinary people. But, it turns out this sweet, little town has a dark and deadly tradition. Every year, using a black box full of slips of paper, they hold a Lottery in which every person, including the children, must take part. The winner is essentially the loser because they get stoned to death. As horrifying as it sounds the towns people have no problem with stoning a friend or loved one to death since the sacrifice supposedly makes the crops grow. The people of the town do not realize they need to stop their tradition because it is an incomprehensible idea, but getting rid of their black box and stopping the tradition would mean getting rid

The story shows each of the townsfolk had been stoning a person every year since they were a child when it notes, “[t]he children had stones already, and someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles [to stone his own mother]” (28). As upsetting as the experience may sound, a child could grow numb to the trauma or even start to see the yearly tradition as “right” after a few years of stoning people. After all, the children have most likely been brain washed to believe if they do not stone a person every year then they will not have a good harvest, so while growing up they probably have come to see The Lottery as a righteous cause. Fear also plays a factor in this town’s tradition. The story reports, “the black box now resting on the stool had been put into use even before Old Man Warner, the oldest man in town, was born” (25); this means the townsfolk had no memory of “before” and they were probably terrified of what would happen if they stopped their tradition. Of course, science has proven their tradition is pointless so why can they not take the leap of faith? The explanation for this is quite simple: change. Humans, for some reason, cannot stand change. This idea is demonstrated in history repeatedly – the most obvious example being the freeing

The back box is clearly important to the townsfolk; many people feel differently about it, but one thing is clear: it is a symbol of death to all. Black has commonly been associated with death throughout history. All forms of death in old and modern literature seem to be clothed in black and some examples include: Charon, the person or thing that ferries dead spirits to the underworld through the river Styx in Greek mythology; dementors, which suck the soul out of people and guard Azkaban, the prison, in “Harry Potter”; and the grim reaper, which has many stories attached to it, but it essentially “reaps” people’s souls. In “The Lottery,” the black box is, in some years, placed in public places where everybody can see it and be reminded of the death coming next June. There were many places the box was put to rest for the year after a Lottery; some examples were explored when the story reports, “[t]he rest of the year, the box was put way, sometimes one place, sometimes another; it had spent one year in Mr. Graves’s barn and another year underfoot in the post office, and sometimes it was set on a shelf in the Martin grocery and left there” (26). Most of the time, the townsfolk could see the box in public regularly, which creates an atmosphere of dread