How Is The Lottery Normalized

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Shirley Jackson's “The Lottery” shows the power of tradition and how it can normalize something that shouldn’t be normalized. Jackson uses items and characters to give a deeper meaning to the story. She uses items like the black box mentioned in the story, as well as characters like Old Man Warner and the tragic fate of Tessie Hutchinson. This analysis will go into how Jackson uses these elements to show the normalization of the lottery in the village. Compare other critics like Helen E. Nebeker and A.R. Compared, we can deeply understand how the lottery reflects societal norms. The first thing that shows normalization is the black box that Shirley Jackson brings into the story. The black box is what the people of the village use to draw from …show more content…

When she comes to the lottery, she seems to be in a happy mood, joking with her fellow villagers about her late arrival and smiling with her husband. As the lottery goes on, people are drawing names from the black box, and Hutchinson’s names are picked. This caused Tessi to shout that there wasn’t a fair chance, since the person who picked their name was rushed. This causes other villagers to clap back at her, and her husband tells her to shut up. Even after the villagers tell her to calm down, she still tries to get the other villagers to start the lottery over. After Hutchinson’s name is drawn, they redraw to see which person from the family name is picked. When the family draws, they realize Tessie was picked for the lottery. Tessie is still trying to tell the villagers that it wasn’t fair until she was stoned to death. To me, this shows how normal it is for the villagers to kill one of their people in the name of a tradition. This brings up the talk of other critics and what they have to say, as well as a comparison of their …show more content…

Coulthard in her analysis of "The Grim View of Human Nature." In her analysis, she talks about how The Lottery shows how grim human nature can be. Coulthard and my analysis of the way we look at the characters in the story and how they can be. We also take an analysis of Tessi Hutchinson and how she reacted to getting chosen in the lottery. While our analyses are similar in how we look at the characters in the story, they are also different. Coulthard mainly looks at the characters and how they act when they interact with one another, and I talk about how certain items and certain characters make the lottery seem normal, just because it is a tradition in the village. After looking at all the analyses, let’s compare all of them

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