Exploring Dark Irony in Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery'

The Irony that is shown in “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson The short story ‘The Lottery” written by Shirley Jackson, is honestly a very confusing twisted story about a small peaceful farming community you think at first, but that’s not the case we soon find out. Jackson does a great job showing the reader the dark side of irony in “the lottery” she does this by giving examples of Exposition, foreshadowing, tone and irony its self. Jackson begins the story by explaining the setting. That is done by telling where the story takes place and what season it takes place in, along with the time of day. “THE MORNING OF JUNE 27TH was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green” (624) Second example from Steve Dimeo “Introduce a setting, but with a twist in the hands of a skilled writer (not Snoopy!) who knows what she's doing, opening with a description can lull a reader into a complacency that can make the shock to come even more startling. Shirley Jackson does this in "The Lottery,' her still often-anthologized short story first published in The Men; Yorker in 1948” (Diemo) These two

She has a foreshadowing web intertwined throughout “the lottery” and it just works! The first example of her foreshadowing written by Jackson “selecting the smoothest and roundest stones; eventually made a great pile of stones in one corner of the square and guarded it against the raids of the other boys.” (625) At first the reader assumes they are just pilling rocks into a pile, kids being kids. But this little sentence that Jackson gives describing that the stones are being smooth is a small detail given in the story, making the reader not catch her true intensions the stones have in the story. In a way it makes the reader wonder at first about the stones and what part they play in the