Cassandra Fyffe English Composition I In Shirley Jacksons “The Lottery”, the author demonstrates how people follow the crowd and it leads to a bad outcome. It’s June 27th, a clear and beautiful day. The flowers are blossomed, the grass is luxuriously green. The kids are out of school for the summer, but they aren’t too thrilled. 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.
Where he stood a little apart from his family. Not looking down at his hand. The color black can represent sadness, mourning, and fear. Every time the box is mentioned before they find out which family has to choose a slip of paper, the box is always preceded with the word black, showing the readers that this box isn’t taken lightly by the villagers, and is a symbol of the death that could so easily be theirs. Word choice [Mr. Summers and Mr. Adams] grinned at one another humorlessly and nervously.
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.
At the beginning of the lottery she was energetic and in a pleasant mood, appearing to have to problem taking part in the day’s events which is evident as soon as she arrived to the lottery. “Mrs. Hutchinson came hurriedly along the path to the square, her sweater thrown over her shoulder and slid into place in the back of the crowd. “Clean forgot what day it was” she said to Mrs. Delacroix, who stood next to he, and they both laughed softly” (4). She began to argue the way the tradition was handled by Mr. Summers and the rest of the villagers when it was her family’s name that was drawn from the box.
The community members are gathered together in the town square. They laugh and gossip. Each family is required to draw two slips of paper from a ballot box. A housewife named Tessie Hutchinson receives a slip of paper with a black mark on it. Because of this type of paper, the rest of the townspeople stone her to death; it is an annual ritualistic sacrifice despite the protests of many people who oppose it.
She meets Tea Cake her love of her life in an afternoon when the whole town left to watch a game including Hezekiah a seventeen year old boy that helps Janie around the store. Janie and Tea Cake had a very good conversation throughout their stay in the store. Tea Cake challenges Janie to a checker game and when he discovers that she could not play he teaches her how to play and helps her close up the store he also walks her home. Even though Janie felt unprotected she thought she knew him before and let him walk her home. Janie and Tea Cake enjoyed each other’s company they made laughs out of nothing and laughed.
Traditions, Logical or Illogical Writers often use symbols to help convey underlying themes and ideas. Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery is a perfect example of a story that can be so loosely interpreted or misunderstood without understanding the stories symbols and underlying themes. At a glance “The Lottery” is just a story about an unusual and morbid village whose people share the love for murder. By analyzing the short story’s symbols, the story becomes much more than a morbid village full of pointless hate. The lottery itself, the black box, family, and the lottery rules are all symbols that build the underlying theme of the story, tradition.
When the villagers gather in the morning, she wants the readers to realize the villagers get nervous and quiet when traditional objects are pulled out to begin the lottery. These objects, such as the “black box” (18) and the “three-legged stool” (18), are connected symbols to their ritual. The color black, which symbolizes “complete death” (black) and “mourning” (black), is used frequently giving the image of darkness in the story. A box symbolizes that it “holds a secret” (box) indicating the power that it contains. The “three-legged stool” (18) is considered to support the citizen’s fate and how the people support this ritual.
Sabrina Branham Mrs. Kathryn Brackett English 102-85 23 February 2015 Symbolism in “The Lottery” “The Lottery” is a great example of literary symbolism. Symbolism is used in this story to help the author reflect on how the human nature is flawed and impure, no matter how pure a person thinks they are, or how pure their environment may seem. “The Lottery” is a very effective story which raises many questions about how pointless the nature of one’s humanity about violence and tradition actually is. This story is clearly an expression of how the author, Shirley Jackson, feels about mankind and the evil nature one has hidden behind rituals and traditions. Her coldness and her lack of compassion is obvious.
The lottery is a reaper of some sort that every year, claims the life of an innocent soul. Jackson confuses the reader with her lively tone, but reels them back in with the small, but meaningful gestures and comments from the town’s people. The villagers accept this form of death because it is the only thing that they know. The tradition of the lottery has been drilled down for so long that Old Man Warner, the oldest of the town, doesn’t know any better. Another form of symbolism is the black box that sits upon the three-legged stool.