A Visit To Grandmother 'And The Lottery'

Our experiences demonstrate how relationships form between people as well how they can be deteriorated easily by a misunderstanding or how they can be dangerous because a person is blindly obedient. The relationships that follow can either better each person involved or inflict emotional damage. A mother and son relationship is very important as a close relationship between them can be very beneficial for both. In the short story A Visit to Grandmother by William Melvin Kelly, a mother son relationship is shown but this is one isn’t very good as it should be. The main character felt unloved by his mother and kept it to himself for thirty years, only to be told the opposite of his thoughts. As the story develops a message can be taken from this

story, it being to never keep negative feelings like neglect to yourself because the whole truth might not be to your knowledge and also that misunderstandings should always be worked out. This poor relationship can be in ways compared to the relationships in the short story The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. The relationship between the townspeople and their blindness in regards to the traditions they kept practicing was a dangerous one as it was in fact murder. The ultimate message of Shirley Jackson’s short story is that it's dangerous to blindly follow a tradition when you don't know the tradition's origin since everyone starts thinking that it's harmless and accepts it and only fear their future without these traditions because the traditions were their life.

Charles from the story A Visit to Grandmother was a “man so kind that when people ventured timidly into his office, it took only a few words from him to make them relax, and even laugh”. He perfectly hid the fact that he never really felt loved by his mother, even from his son until he decides to drive to his mother’s house after the reunion at his old high school with his son, Chig. When Charles kissed his mother on the cheek “something new and almost ugly had come into his eyes: fear, uncertainty, sadness, and perhaps even hatred”. His mother was oblivious to her son’s feelings and thought that both her sons knew that she loved them equally. She felt confused and bad when her Charles finally confessed his feelings to her. His relationship with his mother hurt him badly on an emotional level and caused him to leave home at the age of fifteen. This didn’t eat him up inside completely as he was able to make a life and get an education. He was successful in life but that relationship didn’t do so well for his emotional well being.

Family relationships outside of just mother and son, are also quite important and this can be seen in Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery. In this story, the townspeople follow blindly a tradition that has been going on for as long as anybody could remember. No one “liked to upset even as much tradition”. Other villages has stopped the lottery but this village wouldn’t know what to do without it since their lives revolved around that little black wooden box which represented death since it brought just that every year, one day of the summer. When it is time for the lottery itself, a family is chosen by the black dot on the little piece of paper and has to go on stage for the second stage of this tradition. They do the same thing with the slips of paper and one has the black dot but only with the family that was chosen and whoever gets the paper with the black dot gets stoned to death. During this round, families are forced to turn against each other just like Tessie’s family turned against her and didn’t support her when she claimed Mr. Summers “didn’t give him time enough to take any paper he wanted”. The townspeople had been repeating this tradition for years and years and therefore “forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, [but] they still remembered to use stones”. They didn’t want to break the only thing they had in common with their ancestors so they went along with this, ultimately committing murder every single year. This relationship between the ancestors and the villagers is one that clouds the judgement and morality of the villagers and the lottery being their only reason to do so.

In my personal experience, I’ve witnessed blind obedience which by definition is essentially when someone does something when they’re told and not putting any thought into it, they just do it. My mom is someone I’ve witnessed be blindly obedient to her mom even in the silliest moments. I get it, she’s listening to her mom but I’ve seen my grandma manipulate my mom and my mom not even raising a finger. My mom continues to blindly listen to her mother even when it she doesn’t agree with her. My mom’s blind obedience is similar to how the Townspeople keep practicing the lottery despite changing times. The villagers follow their tradition because their ancestors created the lottery and are afraid to stop because it’s the only thing they know about. Both the villagers and my mom are people who are afraid to live their differently than how it’s always been.

In my personal experience, I believed my mother favorited my older sister and my dad favorited my older brother. I believed I was the least favorite which made me become detached from my parents and siblings and act serious towards them. My parents then explained to me that my brother needed the attention from them because he was in many huge problems at school and my sister was having major trouble in her classes that she was taking. My experience is similar to “A Visit to Grandmother” because in the story, Charles, felt and believed his mother loved his brother ,GL, more than him and created a distant relationship with his family.I believed my parents favorited my older siblings and I was detached from them for a while until my siblings graduated and my parents explained to me about the situation and I realized it was a misunderstanding and my parents told me they loved all their children equally.

There are similarities between the stories of A Visit to Grandmother and The Lottery, both being short stories about families having a difficult relationship between each of the characters in their family.In A Visit to Grandmother, Chig and his father, Charles, went to visit Chig’s grandmother who then begins to tell stories about the times she and GL, Charles’s brother, spent time together.

Charles felt his mother loved GL more than him and that caused their relationship to become distant until his mother explained the truth to him about how Charles was more independent than GL and how she loves all her children equally, “thirty years too late”. In The Lottery, the villagers have been doing the lottery which is their tradition they have been doing every summer where they murdered a family member or friend who “won” the lottery. Tessie believed it was unfair that she won the lottery and got murdered by the village. From these stories, we learn about the relationship between the characters with their family about how we should never keep our negative feelings to ourselves and assume we know the truth because the truth we might know could be wrong .Blindly following a tradition that you don’t know where it originates from could be dangerous because it may seem harmless at first but it could inflict huge amounts of both physical and emotional pain between the people. The relationships in these short stories defined the characters in them and either made them distant in Charles’ case or in The Lottery’s case where families turned against each other and traditions were more important than morality. Just like their situations helped define Charles and the townspeople, relationships exist to better or harm the people involved in them defining everyone at one point in

time.