Symbolism And Tradition In Shirley Jackson's The Lottery

Conformity can make people do cruel things without reason. Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” highlights a village that continues a senseless tradition of stoning the winner of a lottery. Although all the villagers initially seemed innocuous and welcoming, as soon as the winning ticket was drawn, everybody quickly turned against the winner, Mrs. Hutchinson. Through a stark, cold tone, Jackson brings attention to the dangers of unquestionable loyalty to old traditions. Jackson starts the story with antiquated characters that contribute to the blunt tone.

I had a look at two short stories; “The lottery” by Shirley Jackson and “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell, in “The Lottery” Jackson seems to use a live setting but in “The Most Dangerous Game” Connell uses fictional characters. I identified that both stories share a common theme of cruelty and violence. In “The Lottery” the towns’ people participate in a ritual that results to death of an unwilling person so as to satisfy their belief that by sacrificing one of their own will guarantee a plentiful harvest. In “The Most Dangerous Game” humans are hunted as mere animal so as to serve as prey and satisfy desire for a challenge. By comparing the two incidences, the element of violence and cruelty demonstrate the self-centeredness that abounds in each story with the taking of life for

O’Connor’s trait of violence is used throughout to reveal the corrupt and criminal world that emanates the need for salvation. The violence that we do not get to see for ourselves are the crimes the Misfit committed before the story began. The story begins with the grandmother telling Bailey to “read here what it says he did to these people’” (O’Connor 575). These crimes are violent murders that the Misfit committed beforehand. This displays the criminal world that we live in.

“I’ve always been fascinated with the stealing of innocence. It’s the most heinous crime, and certainly a capital crime if there ever was one.”(Clint Eastwood) In the book, To Kill a Mockingbird, this quote reigns true for many reasons. The book starts as a family and friend oriented community, but its true colors show when Atticus Finch takes on a black mans trial. Tempers flare throughout the county and many people end up getting hurt; physically or emotionally. This only proves that the spread of evilness can diminish any bit of innocence left in a persons mind.

The essay often discusses how bad things were in the south, which made me think about my family history, coming from a small town in the southeast corner of Tennessee. The essay also talks of lynching and “vigilante justice”, which can be very easily connected to “To Kill a Mockingbird”. In “To Kill a Mockingbird”, there is an attempted lynching of Tom Robinson, on the sole basis of his race. The essay also discussed law enforcement branding black men as rapist, much like the brute stereotype in “Ethnic Notions”, and our need to protect white women from black men. I found this extremely hypocritical, as most interracial relationships were between a white man, and a black woman, and were not consensual.

Other symbols that are connected in the story are the slips of paper and the black box. In the story, the slip of paper symbolizes equality among the villagers, “All of us took the same chance.” (Jackson 423). This means that all the villagers take the same chance to win on the lottery. On the other hand, the black box symbolizes death and evil. In the story, the box is symbol for the powers of the traditions and fear.

“The Lottery”written by Shirley jackson. The story is about how a town followed by others had a ritual that was strongly followed. The townspeople thought by killing one of the villagers it would bring them a good year of crops. In “the lottery”,Shirley Jackson uses symbolism to strengthen the theme of the story. One of the literary devices that Shirley Jackson uses is symbolism.

When the second drawing was held only among the Hutchinson’s family, Tessie gets the same piece of paper with the dot and is stoned to death. Jackson uses imagery and irony, as well as symbolism to make us aware of the custom, and violence and tradition as the themes of this short story. One literary device which is used by Jackson in this story is imagery. Imagery is defined as concepts or expressions that appeal to the reader’s feelings. Jackson uses vivid imagery to illustrate the start of her story.

In Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery the author creates a complex world, a world that possibly could resemble our world that we live in. Every year the villagers culminate in a violent murder, a bizarre ritual that suggests how dangerous tradition can be when people blindly follow it. Shirley Jackson is a master at manipulating her reader, a tactic that pays off as the story unfolds and all of the things that once seemed pleasant are shown to have a very dark side. Jackson emphasizes the necessity of discarding the tradition of the lottery, because it doesn't fit in present day times. This allusion of sacrifice also suggests that the villagers view the lottery as normal, even necessary, as it is ritualized.

Another story, The Lottery is one of the most famous American short story written by Shirley Jackson. This story talks about the annual lottery that is drawn in a village. This is not the lottery where the winner goes home with a huge sum of money it is the lottery where the prize is death. Both the stories are contrast to each other but some how they have one common ground and that is the