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Why We Keep Playing The Lottery By Adam Piaore Analysis

953 Words4 Pages
Every day, millions of people buy a lottery ticket around the nation, and around the world. In the article “Why We Keep Playing the Lottery”, author Adam Piore portrays his thoughts on why he thinks people continue to buy lottery tickets even when they go years at a time, winning nothing. His exquisite use of diction and imagery make for a very enjoyable, and easy read that also describe his reasoning to why people continue to play the lottery. Piore begins with an example of a woman in Florida who won $590 million dollars, then talks about the statistical chances of someone actually winning the lottery. The biggest, and most crucial aspect of this essay, was his reasoning to why people will continue to buy the tickets. Piore talks about the social aspects towards buying tickets and his tone becomes more serious. “To get your chance of winning down to a coin toss, or 50 percent, you will need to spend 12 hours a day, every day, filling out tickets for the next 55 years”. (698) Piore often times says people will buy tickets just because they like to think what they could do with the money even though they know they aren’t going to win. When Piore gets more information from the woman who has set up the lottery in Tennessee, he begins to see and portray the other side of the aisle; the marketing. Rebecca Paul Hargrove paints vivid pictures of her advertisement ideas to Piore, while he becomes more intrigued by how she is able to get more and more people to buy tickets. While
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Usually there’s a winner in a lottery, but not in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”. This story intrigued me by it's suspenseful nature and it's chaotic events. In small town America, they come together once a year to perform an annual tradition. Mrs. Jackson demonstrates literary devices such as foreshadowing, mood, and conflict in “The Lottery”. Foreshadowing is used quite a few times in “The Lottery”.

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The short story “The Lottery” is written by Shirley Jackson. This story takes place in a small village where everybody knows each other. In this story all the villagers gather around town for their annual lottery. Everyone in the village is compelled to follow this tradition even if the outcome ends up with someone dying. In “The Lottery”, Shirley Jackson uses conflict, theme, and irony to develop this suspenseful short story.

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The characters’ behaviors don’t exactly scream “I love the lottery!” The most logical reason for doing something that makes them unhappy is they are doing it as a tradition. But why not break the tradition? After digging a little deeper, it is easy to see that the lottery has been going on for a long time: “There was a story that the present box had been made with some pieces of the box that had preceded it, the one that had been constructed when the first people settled down to make a village here (p. 16, lines 78-82).” Since the original black box was made when the village first settled, the lottery is an ancient tradition that is generations old.

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