The Lottery Theme Essay

The Lottery Theme Analysis Rules are made to be followed. That is why they are set in place, but what happens when the rules cause unneeded harm? In Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery A village has a lottery, but it is not a typical one. In this lottery, everyone in the village gathers and the heads of families all draw paper from a black box. The family that has a paper with a dot on it draws again and the person with the dot then gets beaten to death by the other villagers throwing rocks at them. The Lottery’s theme is that blindly following rules and tradition can be bad. The townspeople had no other reason for the lottery besides that it was “tradition”. The lottery was a very old tradition. “The original paraphernalia for the lottery had been lost long ago, and the black box...had been put into use even before Old Man Warner, the oldest man in town, was born”. No one wanted to change what had been going on for a long time. Mr. Summers, the person in charge of the lottery, even told people to make a new black box because of how shabby theirs was, but no one wanted to change tradition. None of the townspeople remembered why they had the lottery; they just did, and that caused someone to needlessly lose their life.

Jackson, the author, starts the story using imagery talking about the “...clear and sunny [morning], with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green.”. Then Jackson goes into the real story, and she makes everything mundane from then on. She starts including small, unimportant details, and elongates what’s going on to show what this event does to the moods of the people and what gloom it brings with it. No one in the town liked the lottery, but they all still thought it was crucial because of the tradition that came with it. This ends with a person being murdered by her own town and is a very sad event that wasn’t