Biography of Shirley Jackson

Winning at a price

“Although ominous symbolic details prepare for the tragic outcome the reader's attention is skilfully distracted”(Schaub). The word Lottery makes a person think of winning and good fortune in this ironic short story an unexpected change of events occurs. Shirley Jackson was born in December 14, 1916 and died August 8, 1965. Growing up she wrote poems and short stories she fluctuated in colleges but ended up earning her degree and meeting her future husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, at Syracuse University. She suffered weight gain throughout her life and also was a heavy smoker causing her early death at the age of 48. In the short story, The Lottery, there is a small town on a nice spring day gathering in the towns center to conduct the annual Lottery. Whichever family pulls the unlucky black dot on a piece of paper is the winner. In the end of the story you discover the winner of the lottery is not so lucky and is actually stoned to death. Shirley Jackson develops her theme that questions if traditions are always good in her short story “The Lottery” through the use of symbolism, characterization, and irony.

The story contains many symbols, some of these are the Box and the Stones. One symbol are the stones collected by the children in the beginning of the story. “The children arrive first, and some of the boys begin to put rocks and stones into a pile” (Du Bose). At the beginning of the story the atmosphere is festive like and cheerful more than morbid. Although it is unusual for children to be collecting stones the detail is overlooked because of the rest of the descriptions of the town. It is simply tradition to the children and even their parents do not see anything wrong with it which proves my theme. “Bob...

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...rtray this idea of an imperfect tradition. When people lose sight of why they are doing something then its time to change it.

Works Cited

Du Bose, Thomas. “The Lottery.” Masterplots, Fourth Edition (2010): 1-3. Literary Reference Center. Web. 29 Jan. 2014.

Jackson, Shirley. “The Lottery.” 1950. Modem Short Stories: A Critical Anthology. N.p.: Harcourt, Brace ed., 1986. 394-90. Print.

Schaub, Danielle. “Shirley Jackson’s Use of Symbols in ‘The Lottery..’” Journal of the Short Story in English 14 (Spring 1990): 79-86. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 187. Detroit: Gale, 2007. Literature Resource Center. Web. 29 Jan. 2014.

Wagner-Martin, Linda. “The Lottery: Overview.” Reference Guide to Short Fiction. Ed. Noelle Watson. Detroit: St. James Press, 1994. Literature Resource Center. Web. 29 Jan. 2014.