Tradition In Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery'

Javier Rosario march 7, 2018

ENC 1143

The Lottery

Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” shows how a tradition goes through certain changes as years pass, and how the people manipulate that same tradition. Throughout the story, we can see how the people live their lives around a tradition that has become an assassination instead of a sacrifice. The primary events in the story seem benign. Children run around the town square collecting stones, and while they pile up the stones, the adult villagers arrive (women first then men). Nevertheless, as the story goes we can see how the events change from benign to dangerous.

Old Man Warner, the oldest man in town,

This box stands with great importance in the story and for the people in the village. The black box symbolizes the villagers on the longevity of their tradition and the fact that many people before them upheld the practice of the lottery. In the lottery, the villagers need to draw slips of paper from the black box. All the slips of paper remain white except for one, which has the black dot. The person who picks up the paper with the black dot from the box ultimately wins the lottery and he/she gets stoned to death. This black box symbolizes the tradition itself because neither one stays original. The villagers influence both the lottery as well as the black box. The civilians living in the village did not want to stop the lottery nor change the old, splintered box, not caring of the unoriginality of the box. On the contrary, the civilians still undermine changes of their

Tradition keeps the beliefs, philosophies, and activities of societies alive and pass them from generation to generation. However, civilizations do not practice all traditions with pure intentions. “The Lottery” exhibits a tradition not practiced purely. As time passes, people change and automatically causes traditions to change, in other words, evolve. When the day of the lottery came, the villagers would show up scared. Everyone went to the town square terrified of picking the paper with the black dot and live to see the villagers stone them to death. Now, in the actual time of the story, we can see how everyone arrives to town square with a different attitude, “Soon the men began to gather, surveying their own children, speaking of planting and rain, tractors and taxes. They stood together, away from the pile of stones in the corner, and their jokes were quiet and they smiled rather than laughed. The women, wearing faded house dresses and sweaters, came shortly after their menfolk. They greeted one another and exchanged bits of gossip as they went to join their husbands.” (Jackson). Such event indicate the villagers already know the winner they will stone to death. Shirley Jackson creates irony with this situation because the last person arriving to the town square for the lottery ironically is the person who picks up the paper with the black dot and the fellow villagers stone her to