Shirley Jackson’s Story “The Lottery

Shirley Jackson wrote the story “The Lottery”, this story starts in a little village were only about three hundred people lived. It was a clear summer day, June 27th. The readers could think about this story as a happily ending story. Everyone thinks the word lottery is happiness and luckiness. In this case, the word lottery has a different meaning at the end of the story. What happens at the end of the story only happens in modern day movies or TV shows. While reading the story, the readers could find important symbols of the story. Some of those symbols might mean something else rather than what the readers might think it really means. There were five symbols that have an important role in Jackson’s story, those being the black box, the stones, the black spot, the stool, and the names Graves, Warner and Summers.

In Jackson’s story, the black box is symbolic. “The original paraphernalia for the lottery had been long lost ago, and the black now resting on the stool had been put into use even before

Old Man Warner, the oldest man in town was born” (Jackson). The black box symbolized death. The color of the box also represents death or evil. That gives the readers a clue that something bad is going to happen in the story. Another symbol the box has is that it’s old and ugly. The box being old and ugly represents that it has been used for many years. The black box was used to put all the little pieces of paper that were going to be drawn out. This black box was put in the middle of the circle made by all the villagers.

The next important symbolic symbol in Jackson’s story was the stones. “Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones” (Jackson). The stones sy...

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...aves are used when a person passes away. Mr. Graves was the second most important person. He was the post master. Mr. Graves was the only person that helped Mr. Summers prepare for the lottery. Another thing the readers could see was that Mr. Graves was the person that was holding little Dave piece of paper during the second drawing.

At the end, the readers can see that there are words that mean something else. The author of the story, Jackson wants the readers to get clues of what is going to happen at the end of the story. Some readers won’t be able to catch those symbolic words. All readers will just have to pay close attention when they are reading short stories like Jackson’s story. All the clues like the black box, the stool, and the names were excellent clues the author gave the readers to find out some unlucky person was going to win its own death.