Point Of View In Shirley Jackson's The Lottery

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Who wouldn’t want to win the lottery? Villagers in Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery probably wouldn’t. In this short story, villagers play a yearly lottery which ends in the “winner” being stoned to death. Jackson’s short story has been the center of controversy for its unforeseen macabre ending, but it is also an example of a well written short story. Three elements of short stories that are evident in The Lottery are a limited point of view, contrasting characters, and a heavy emphasis on traditional and familial themes.
The narrator’s position in relation to the story being told is called the point of view. The point of view can make a dramatic change in the way a reader perceives the story. In The Lottery, the point of view is third person …show more content…

From the very beginning, Jackson emphasizes how much family matters to the people of the village. Before the lottery takes place, the children play, the men watch their children, and the wives join their husbands. The lottery is set up by family too. Lists are made of “heads of families, heads of households in each family, and members of each household in each family”. During the ritual, the townspeople discuss boys who draw in place of their fathers and how the lottery is drawn. The male head of the family draws, and the man who has the black dot must draw a second time with just the other members of his family. This theme effects the story particularly because Tessie does not start to protest the lottery until she learns that someone in her family will die that lottery. When Bill draws the black dot, she panics, demanding that Bill’s sisters should have a chance at loss as well. However, she does not get her way, as the lottery has a very strict set of familial rules. When Tessie is selected to be stoned, someone gives her son a few pebbles to help. Jackson emphasized family so heavily to make the effect of her death even more unsettling. In a community where family is so important and central, the lottery quickly makes members of the same family kill one of their own. All of this is done under the deleterious influence of …show more content…

The villagers believe that the tradition of the lottery is what keeps corn to eat on their tables and keeps them from living primitively in caves. Throughout the story, Old Man Warner remarks that the people who have given up the lottery are young fools. Jackson’s usage of phrases such as “The children assembled first, of course,” and “The people had done it so many times that they only half listened to the directions,” imply that the tradition of the lottery has been so longstanding that it is heavily ingrained into their culture. The idea that the lottery has been around for a long time is supported by the fact that a second box that has been around since before even Old Man Warner was born was needed. The author writes about parts of the ritual that have been lost over the years. Jackson wrote that Tessie would be stoned as a criticism of tradition. She spends most of the story building up the importance of family, and in just a few sentences, tradition causes the villagers to disregard the family values that are so important to

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