The Lottery

The Lottery

Being apart of a group can be the most fulfilling aspect of a person’s life. One can enjoy being surrounded by community and traditions to which they are accustomed. When one is apart of a community, he or she is obligated, most times, to participate in whatever rituals or ceremonies that the community is involved in. If one chooses not to participate in the ritual or ceremony, one might be shunned by the group and made an outcast. Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery,” the village participates in an annual lottery to determine which one of the villagers will be sacrificed in order for their crops to prosper the following year. On June 27th each year, the villagers gather and draw papers from an old box. The family that draws the paper with the black dot must then draw again. The family member that pulls the black dot is then stoned to death. Even though the ceremony ends in apparent tragedy, the villagers have no problem blindly carrying out their tradition because they are ignorant to its lack of necessity and cruelty.

The lottery had been happening in this village, and the villages surrounding it, since it was founded. Jackson mentions that “the black box…had been put into use even before Old Man Warner, the oldest man in town, was born”(351). Not one of the villagers knows when the lottery officially started, nor do they know the actual rituals that surrounded the lottery when it was created. Jackson, through her character Old Man Warner, alludes to the longevity and importance of the lottery. Warner says, “There’s always been a lottery.” It doesn’t seem that the lottery’s history gives any indication of the reason it is carried out each year. Even after completing the story the reader is given no information about the purpose of the annual event. Even though no one in the story could definitely say when the lottery had begun, the tradition had stuck with the villagers for many years.

Tradition is defined by the Merriam-Webster online dictionary as “a belief or story or a body of beliefs or stories relating to the past that are commonly accepted as historical though not verifiable.” The tradition in Jackson’s “The Lottery” is the choosing of slips of paper to determine who would be stoned. Many traditions include a rituals and ceremonies and “The Lottery” is no different. The author mentions that “much of the ritual had been forgotten or discarded,” (351). From this statement, one can assume that the actual tradition of the lottery is not what sustained it for so long. The simplest part of the lottery, the black box, is also a clue that the tradition means almost nothing to the townspeople. The black box is not the original box that was used at the start of the lottery, even though Jackson tells us that there is “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” (351). The townspeople are ignorant of the history and clueless as to the tradition of the lottery. Their ignorance seems to hail from their comfort with their place in the community and their unwillingness to challenge the system.

Even though it is not explicitly stated in the story, the reader definitely picks up on the hierarchy of the small village. Of the three hundred residents, there are two that stand out as the leaders, Mr. Summers, the man who owned the coal business in the village, and Mr. Graves, the postmaster. Jackson says “the lottery was conducted by Mr. Summers, who had time and energy to devote to civic activities” (350). One would think that this is because the people of the village were more occupied with working and being hardworking citizens in order to not be chosen for the lottery. The village is male-dominated. This is shown in the beginning of the short story when Jackson mentions that “the women, wearing faded house dresses and sweaters, came shortly behind their menfolk” (350). As heads of households, the men are the ones who had to choose