Lottery The Lottery

Most people are hopeful to win a prize when they think of the lottery, but that is not the case in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”. In this short story, winning the lottery is a bad thing, not a good thing. If someone were to win the lottery in this case, he or she would be stoned to death. To determine who is the lucky winner of this dreadful lottery, the man of each household is to pick a piece of paper outside of a black box and the one with a black dot on the paper is the winning family. Then, each member of the family picks a paper out of a box and again, the one with the black dot is the winner, or in this case, the loser. One would assume the family that is chosen would be devastated and do anything to protect each other, but that is

As people start arriving at the square on June 27th, families starting migrating towards each other as one would expect. As the men initially went up to grab their slip of papers, the wives hoped their husbands would not have the one with the black dot in the middle. These beginning instances of the lottery show the families as united and caring for one another, but once one man has the card with the dot and that family is at risk, things change. This is what happened with the Hutchinson family. When Bill Hutchinson opened his paper and saw that it would be his family on the line, his wife shouted to the crowd that Mr. Summers “didn’t give [Mr. Hutchinson] time enough to take any paper he wanted” (Jackson) and how it was not fair. Here, there is still a sense of family because Mrs. Hutchinson is upset that it is her family up for the final lottery. Very shortly after though, Mr. Summers asks the Hutchinson family if there are “any other households in the Hutchinsons” (Jackson), and Mrs. Hutchinson is quick to throw Don and Eva under the bus. Initially the reader sees Mrs. Hutchinson upset for her family, but then turns her back on the other members in her household

Mrs. Hutchinson’s family seems to act as if they do not care that they are stoning her, and only care that they are following the tradition and rules of the annual lottery. The only way for the lottery to work year after year is if the family of the one being stoned does not act out emotionally, otherwise they would petition for the lottery to end and would fight against participating, but all families in the village seemed to willingly participate. Even Old Man Warner who has participated for seventy-seven years believes this is a tradition that cannot end. Within these seventy-seven years he has to have lost some good friends and family members, but to him it does not matter. The lottery brings out the worst in people because it makes them forget what family and love for a person