Comparing The Lottery And The Story Of An Hour

Death can come in many ways. It can be sudden, or over a strenuous period of time. It can seem random, but sometimes is planned and thought out. There are just about as many ways to deal with death, as there are ways to die. While both The lottery and The Story of an Hour explore the theme of death and grief, The lottery tells a tale of the sacrificial death for a community (necessary, no grief) while The Story of an Hour depicts the natural death of a loved one (grief, but, later, revelation) and how we eventually come to terms with it. In The Lottery by Shirley Jackson we are told of a small village of about 300 and the event that takes place on June 27th of every year. All members of the community are required to participate in this lottery

The only hint of why it may be done is by Old Man Warner when he says, “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon” implying that it may have started with the belief that sacrificing would bring a successful harvesting season. Most, if not all, villagers have a sort of monotonous attitude towards this day and its events. Knowing that someone is about to be chosen at random to be stoned to death does not seem to faze them very much. There is even a somewhat frolicsome tone in the children as they gather piles of rocks to be used for the stoning and cavort around with their peers before the drawing. This tone is reiterated when we see Tessie Hutchinson state that she “Clean forgot what day it was… and then I looked out the window and the kids were gone, and then I remembered it was the twenty-seventh and came a-running”. Most if not all of the villagers seem to view the death of Tessie as necessary and traditional. To the people of this community, death has

Her sister, Josephine, broke the news to her “in broken sentences, veiled hints that revealed in half concealing”. After hearing of her husband’s death, Mrs. Mallard locks herself in her room to mourn. She sits in a chair facing an open window and begins to sob. As she sat gazing at an open patch of blue sky, a thought started to come to her. “Free, free, free!” escapes her lips. She realizes that this is the benefit of her husband’s death. She has no one to live for in the coming years but herself. Moments after this revelation, her thought to be deceased husband walks through the front door. He had not died after all. The shock of his appearance kills Mrs. Mallard. The reason his appearance is such a shock is left deliberately