How Does Shirley Jackson Use Irony In The Lottery

A Lottery You Don’t Want to Win

When we think of traditions, we conjure up images of trick or treaters, Christmas trees, and eating turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. Although most of us are clueless about the origins of these traditions, we have accepted them without question. However, what if our traditions and laws involved persecution and murder? Would we still accept them without question? Although we might immediately be thinking to ourselves, “Of course we wouldn’t accept it! What kind of a question is that?”, events such as the Holocaust have proven that we just might, especially if some sort of authority is involved. In the short story “The Lottery”, author Shirley Jackson employs irony to portray how dangerous it is to follow traditions

The title has a positive connotation, but as we read further, we see that that is not the case. Typically, a lottery is something you want to win. It can grant you money, trips, and other prizes; however, the lottery that Shirley Jackson describes in her story is something you want to avoid winning. While the traditional lottery grants someone as the winner, this lottery marks someone as the persecuted. By calling it “the lottery”, Jackson keeps the audience unaware of the story’s true essence. “The lottery was conducted—as were the square dances, the teenage club, the Halloween program—by Mr. Summers, who had time and energy to devote to civic activities” (263). The lottery is equated to dances and teen clubs, and it’s not until we learn the true nature of the lottery that we are shocked about the comparison. These are activities and institutions that seem normal to us, and they are being compared to a brutal ritual. This implies that we need to take a deeper look at our traditions and institutions and determine whether they are actually beneficial or not. For example, just as "the lottery” did not give off a negative connotation, neither did the name that the Nazis used to describe what we know as the Holocaust. They euphemistically referred to it as the “Final Solution”