Essays on the lottery by shirley jackson

Essays on the lottery by shirley jackson

 · The Lottery by Shirley Jackson Essay September 29, by Essay Writer In the movie entitled The Day the Earth Stood Still the protagonist said that people change when faced with a life and death situation. There is truth to this statement because human beings will do everything to blogger.comted Reading Time: 5 mins  · This page of the essay has words. Download the full version above. “The Lottery”, a short story, by Shirley Jackson is a very suspenseful yet shocking read, which focus on how tragic it can be to blindly follow a tradition. The story is set in a small town, on the summer morning of June blogger.comted Reading Time: 6 mins  · May 8, by Essay Writer George Bernard Shaw once said, progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. In Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery, a town participates in a lottery that determines the victim of the town’s ritual blogger.comted Reading Time: 7 mins

"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson - Words | Essay Example

The Lotterya short story by Shirley Jackson, developed the themes of adherence to meaningless traditions, parenting and scapegoating. The broad aftermath and the negative responses of the readers who did not see the line between fiction and reality prove essays on the lottery by shirley jackson the plot of the short story The Lottery by Jackson reflects the real problems of the modern community. The plot of the story depicts a two hours lottery in a small town which finishes with a ritualistic death ceremony of stoning the unlucky participant as a sacrifice for ensuring a better harvest.

At the beginning of the short story, the village children walk around collecting stones. Summers who runs the lottery mixes the slips of paper in a black box, checks if everyone is in place and invites the heads of the families to draw the papers. When it clears out that Bill Hutchinson gets the unlucky slip, his wife Tessie starts protesting saying that her husband had not enough time for making his choice and the lottery is not fair, essays on the lottery by shirley jackson.

Then, each member of the Hutchinsons family selects a slip of paper, and Tessie draws a slip with a black dot on it. Then, the villagers throw their stones into Tessie as a part of their death ritual. The fact that Tessie does not question the rite itself, but protests against the choice of her family emphasizes the idea of adherence to tradition as the major theme of the short story.

The rite is regarded as sacred and the idea of doubting it does not occur to anybody. When Mrs. Adams admits that the ritual of the lottery has already been abandoned in other villages, Warner as the eldest man in this community answers that giving up the rite can cause only troubles. For instance, the Nazis scapegoated the Jewish people, proclaiming them the reason of their troubles.

Regardless of the current societal progress, essays on the lottery by shirley jackson, modern people frequently scapegoat sexual and ethnical minorities, blaming them for the current moral decay and other social problems. The social phenomenon of scapegoating is rooted deep in public consciousness and tradition according to which the dominating social group looks for the opportunities of self-affirmation and shifting the responsibility for their problems on the others.

Though the ritual of stoning to death has certain historical basis, its meaning is rather symbolical and should not be taken literally by modern readers.

The examples of scapegoating the others, including the limited rights of immigrants for finding a good job and the so-called glass ceiling due to which women receive lower salaries than men doing the same job and have lower chances for career promotion clearly represent the phenomenon of scapegoating in modern community. After the short story was published in The New Yorker inthe author received hundreds of hostile letters from the essays on the lottery by shirley jackson objecting to the brutal ending of the story.

The debates concerning the actual location of these rites prove that the line between the fiction and reality as perceived by the readers appeared to be unclear. Hypocritically concealing their fear of becoming a scapegoat, not feeling empathy with Tessie Hutchinson who becomes a victim and not having moral strength and common sense to abandon the meaningless rite, essays on the lottery by shirley jackson characters of the short story have a strong resemblance to modern readers.

Thus, the plot of the short story can be regarded as the exaggerated reflection of the phenomenon of scapegoating as the imaginary solution to the real problems of the modern community.

Hattenhauer, Darryl. State University of New York Press, Murphy, Bernice. Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy. Need a custom Essay sample written from scratch by professional specifically for you? certified writers online. Select a citation style:. Learn More. You are free to use it for research and reference purposes in order to write your own paper; however, you must cite it accordingly.

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The Lottery by Shirley Jackson - Themes

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 · This page of the essay has words. Download the full version above. “The Lottery”, a short story, by Shirley Jackson is a very suspenseful yet shocking read, which focus on how tragic it can be to blindly follow a tradition. The story is set in a small town, on the summer morning of June blogger.comted Reading Time: 6 mins  · September 29, by Essay Writer. The Lottery, a short story by Shirley Jackson, developed the themes of adherence to meaningless traditions, parenting and scapegoating. The broad aftermath and the negative responses of the readers who did not see the line between fiction and reality prove that the plot of the short story The Lottery by Estimated Reading Time: 5 mins  · May 8, by Essay Writer George Bernard Shaw once said, progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. In Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery, a town participates in a lottery that determines the victim of the town’s ritual blogger.comted Reading Time: 7 mins