What Does The Scapegoat Symbolize In The Lottery

Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” is simply trying to understand what the symbols in the short story mean. In “The Lottery” there are amount of symbols that are included in the story such as the lottery itself, the black box, the stoning, the tools used in the lottery, and even the people of the town. The lottery itself is clearly symbolic, it symbolizes scapegoat. The idea of scapegoat is that it is a person who people get chosen at random to blame for their own problems. Throughout “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, the town participates in a lottery, where the person chosen has stones thrown on them. People in the village unfortunately get lucky in the draw, and some fortunately do not. As soon as the villagers show up in that town square, as soon as they participate in society at large, they are left open to the chance of catastrophic failure. The theme of the lottery is not only life’s choice, but also the sudden unexpected nature of death.

Another representation of symbolism would be through the use of objects. Perhaps the most obvious of these objects would be the black box mentioned in the short story, the black box in which the citizens in the village draw from. It marks one unlucky winner to be murdered by its fellow villagers. This old box represents the tradition of the lottery itself. No one in the village really knows how the lottery began,

These three legs of the stool symbolizes the Christian Trinity; God the Father, God the Sun, and God the Holy Spirit. The three legged stool is symbolic in one way, which is because the Holy Trinity has a connection to God, and the villager’s God played a very important role in their lives. The villagers in the short story believed that they had to follow the tradition set before them or else they would not receive a good