Tradition In Shirley Jackson's The Lottery

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The Lottery,is a short fictional story published in 1948 and written Shirley Jackson in the magazine called, The New Yorker.Some of the main characters of this story are, the Hutchinsons,Mrs. Delacroix,Old Man Warner,Mr. Summers,Mr. Martin,Mr. Graves, and Mrs. Dunbar. The Lottery is about this village that has a very strong tradition where somebody has to sacrifice for the crop, but some younger adults don’t like the tradition and want to give it up. ”Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon,” was the old saying. The head of the household/husband has to draw a piece of paper out of this black box. After that, they then reveal who “wins” the piece of paper with the black dot on it. Next, if your father/husband “wins”, the entire household, then has …show more content…

This can relate to real life because if you have a tradition to do this,this,and this at a holiday, there will be a very, very slim chance that you will change it, because it’ what you have always done.To start with, in this story the power of tradition changed everything because nobody knew why they were doing the lottery or who even started it. Nobody ever asked questions and they did what they were told to do. They didn’t ask questions because that’s all they knew, also they knew if they would ask questions they could possibly get themselves killed. They also followed the steps of the lottery in the same way they have always been. If they didn’t, some older people might have gotten angry and didn’t think it went how it should have gone. It might not have flown the way they wanted it to flow. In the end, the theme of this short story could be that power of tradition can change how things …show more content…

In the story, it affected how you had to infer what happened to her after one hit and what they were all saying