After school a few of the kids start collections stones, soon after their parents started to call them to gather up to get ready for the lottery .Bobby Martin has his pockets full of rocks. After all of the village people had arrived in the square between the post office and the bank, Mr. Summers (the conductor of the lottery), and Mr. Graves (the postmaster and Mr. Summers assistant) did also. Everyone in the village feel bad for him because he has no children and a wife who isn’t’ too pleasant. Mr. Graves sets down a stool and Mr. Summers sets an old black box down on top of it. The black box is older than Old Man Warner, the
Mrs. Hutchinson is an outcast compared to the rest of the town. She shows up late to the lottery where the rest of the town has already been there and started assembling for the drawing. She shows up flustered and out of breath saying she forgot what day it was whereas, the rest of the town had already assembled according to family. The only person to not be in attendance is a man with a broken leg. As she gets there she says “clean forgot what day it was” (pg.
In this story, it starts off with villagers of a small town gather together in the square on June 27th for the town lottery. In other towns, the lottery takes longer, but there are only 300 people in this village, so the lottery takes only two hours. Village children run around collecting stones and put them in their pockets and make a pile followed by the men then the women. Right now, in the beginning of the story, I felt that was awkward to start off a story with. That was kind of ironic to me.
In Shirley Jackson’s, “The Lottery,” Jackson displays the fear of the lottery in the villagers by using symbolism, word choice, and sentence structure. Symbolism [Mr. Summers and Mr. Adams] grinned at one another humorlessly and nervously. Then Mr. Adams reached into the black box and took out a folded paper. He held it firmly by one corner as he turned and went hastily back to his place in the crowd. Where he stood a little apart from his family.
He started seeing white poor kids in the streets when he was running errands for his master. He began asking these kids to teach him how to read by bribing them with bread that he would take from his master’s house. After he learned how to read, he still did not know how to write. When he was twelve, he got an idea from the ship-yard to learn some letters, because he saw that the workers there marked the lumber with letter initials, depending on what part of the ship the lumber belonged to. This way he learned only 6 letters, and the rest he learned from the white kids.
James is Ruth's son. He grew up in “orchestrated chaos” with his eleven sibling sin the poor, all-black projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn. By digging deep into his mothers past, and his own past, he hoped to find understanding of his racial, religious, and social identity. James was always embarrassed of his mother's whiteness, because it shows her differences from his peers and their parents. As James grew older, he began to accept his mother more easily.
3 March 2015 Evil Disguised as Tradition “The Lottery” is a short story written by Shirley Jackson that tells the story of a town and its tradition of a yearly lottery. In this story, the townspeople come together once a year to pull slips from a box to see who will be stoned to death. The lottery is the main subject of this story and the rules of the lottery are simple. One person from every household (usually the man of the house) pulls a ticket from the traditional black box of slips. Whoever pulls the slip with a black dot, must draw again, only this time the only people that will draw from the black box with be the members of the household that pulled the slip with the black dot first.
“The Lottery” Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” portrays a small town in which the citizens gather for a yearly lottery. Unlike a typical lottery, this is one you would not want to win. The lottery in this story is used for public stoning contrary to the first thing that comes to the readers mind when they think of winning the lottery; a big sum of money. This work of fiction demonstrates conformity and rebellion, while suggesting that the lottery is a ritualistic ceremony. “The Lottery” focuses around a village on their annual lottery.
Danielle Schaub agrees that “the villagers' fear of changing either the course of the lottery or the ritualistic objects discloses to what extent they are caught in the web of tradition” (Schaub 82). The villagers’ treatment of the box represents their thinking on the subject of the lottery as a whole: they're a bit terrified by both the box and the lottery, but they're also too frightened (and, perhaps even fascinated), to drop either one. Like the lottery as a whole, the black box has no functionality except during this two hours every June: "It had spent one year in Mr. Graves's barn and another year underfoot in the post office and sometimes it was set on a shelf in the Martin grocery and left there" (Jackson 244). The purpose of the box, like the lottery itself, has become obscure with the passage of time. It is well worn, but the villagers are reluctant to let it go, again, like the lottery
It wasn’t fair (8)”. When it was Tessie’s families turn to draw from the black box to see which member of the Hutchinson family was going to be sacrificed, knowing that once married her daughter could not draw with her family; she tried to convince Mr. Summers to include her married daughter to lessen her chances of being chosen. “There’s Don and Eva, Mrs. Hutchinson yelled. Make them take their chance. Daughters draw with their Husbands’ families, Tessie, you know that as well as anyone else (8).” The tradition of the lottery was held so strong on the town’s members, even Tessie’s own