Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery is a story of a small town whose citizens are required to participate in a yearly “lottery”. The reader soon finds, however, that unlike most lotteries this is not a lottery that one hopes to win. Although we do not find out what the prize of the lottery is until the end, we do find that the town gathers yearly and when they gather each citizen is required to draw a paper from a black box. The family that receives the “winning” paper is required to place their papers back in the box and the whole family is required to draw again. Whatever family member draws the paper with the black dot wins the lottery. We do not find out until the end that the winning family member is sentenced to death in an unusual way.
The setting of Jackson’s story is a deceptively tranquil village which gives little hint of its inhabitants potential for violence. We learn the lottery takes place on a warm summer day and the kids of the town have just got out of school for summer break. The story begins with the sound of happy kids in the background gathering stones to pile around the square for the lottery. The women and men of the town gather around as well, happy and gossiping while they wait for the lottery to begin. “The children assembled first, of course… they tended to gather together quietly for a while before they broke into boisterous play… Soon the men began to gather… They stood together, away from the pile of stones in the corner, and their jokes were quiet and they smiled rather than laughed… The women, wearing faded house dresses and sweaters, came shortly after their menfolk. They greeted one another and exchanged bits of gossip as they went to join their husbands.” (1) The setting for the story is very specific and we know of everything that is going on while the lottery is taking place. We learn of the emotions that some of the villagers are beginning to have and we learn that for some reason certain villagers turn two-faced. The setting hardly contributes to the central idea of the story, but it does stimulate the climax greatly.
Although it is not fairly clear who the main character of The Lottery is we learn that Tessie Hutchinson ends up being the dynamic character of the story. When she finds out that her husband, Bill Hutchinson, is the winner of this lottery she begins to complain saying that he did not have enough time to choose any paper he wanted. Bill, still not having a problem with the lottery, tells Tessie to shut up and they continue on. All of Tessie’s life she has been peer pressured into thinking that the lottery was just a fun thing that the town had always done. It is not until she is declared the winner that her attitude changes about the lottery, and she learns that peer pressure can sometimes lead you to a position that you never wanted to be in.
In The Lottery there are two types of conflict that the reader learns about, internal and external. While we do not learn of either conflict until the end of the story, the author begins setting up the conflict from the very beginning. In the beginning of “The Lottery” we are told of a town whose inhabitants lead very average lives that we can relate to. The narrator talks about the kids playing in the square, and the townspeople that have gathered and are chit-chatting and making jokes with one another. It is not until the lottery takes place that we learn of the potential for violence that the townspeople possess. Externally, we find that once Tessie is declared the winner of the lottery she turns on the very people that she loves and wants to redo the lottery so that another person can be declared the winner. Internally, she finds that the lottery is not what everyone has made it out to be, peer pressure is what was controlling her entire life.
People often fear change, scared that it will be a turn for the worse. The characters in The Lottery are no different. Being born into peer pressure, the townspeople grow up believing that the violence of the lottery is a fun necessity that the town needs in order to survive. They are not capable of seeing the fact that what they are doing is cruel and unnecessary. In the end the winner finds that the lottery is far overdue for change, but by then it is too late.
Work Cited
Shirley Jackson. (2006, September 23). American Literature. Retrieved September 23, 2008, from http://www.americanliterature.com/Jackson/SS/TheLottery.html
