Summary Of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery

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The Lottery, by Shirley Jackson was written in 1948. The Lottery is about a village that has their annual Lottery every year. The purpose of The Lottery is to ensure enough rain to have a good corn crop the following June. They believe that if they do not do this, then they will begin to have hard times. The towns Old Man Warner sums this up "Pack of crazy fools, listening to young folks, northing's good enough for them. Next thing you know, they'll want to go back to living in caves, nobody work anymore, live that way for awhile. Used to be a saying about 'Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.' First thing you know, we'd all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns. There's always been a lottery." This is made for use to believe that they are not for change in their town. …show more content…

The lottery is basically a game of chance. The slips of paper that use to be wood chips are now in a box that are mixed randomly and one of the slips has a black dot. Whoever gets the black dot will then have to die. Mr. Summers has a black box with everyone’s family on pieces of paper. He calls up the men of each family to draw a piece of paper. After everyone draws it turns out that the Hutchinson family picked the marked piece of paper. So they put more pieces of paper in the box and then everyone in the Hutchinson family picks a piece of paper out of the box. This time Tess Hutchinson picked the paper with the black dot. She began complaining about it talking about “It’s not fair you did not give him enough time to pick the one he wanted” and over and over she kept yelling “it’s not fair” Until they began stoning her to death to bring good fortune to the

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