“The Lottery”, by Shirley Jackson, is quite an unusually result than expected. This lottery takes place in a village of a couple hundred people with a “winner”. However this winner is not the win monney type of winner but rather stoned to death by the village people. Each man of the household takes a slip of paper from the black box, whichever household gets a black dot, has to run again with each family member taking an additional slip. The one with the black dot is made “winner”, which comes to be Tessie Hutchinson later in the short story. The lottery is continued because it is an old tradition done as a small ritual of a human sacrifice. First of all in this story, Mr. Summers the official of the lottery, calls each household representative. It tells how the black box, the holder of the cards, is different than it used to be a long time ago and the story states. “...the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box.” This quote states that the lottery is a tradition and how the black box was lost but was replaced and still used throughout the years. Yet the villagers put a lot of work into keeping the lottery alive? They want it alive because as it states the “original” black box had been lost but was replaced and continued for decades as the ritual of the ongoing tradition. …show more content…
Summers stirs the papers in the box and the story states. “...so much of the ritual had been forgotten or discarded, Mr. Summers had been successful in having slips of paper substituted for chips of wood that had been used for generations.” This line tells us many things about this tradition. It tells us that some rituals had been forgotten or replaced like the chips of wood or the black box. It also tells us that the lottery had been passed down for generations which is important because there must had been many ajustions to the