The Lottery Inhumanity

“Lottery” 623 Words Shirley Jackson (1919-1965) was a native of San Francisco and later resided in Rochester, New York. She received a degree from Syracuse University. She settled in Bennington, Vermont with her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman. He was a literary critic. There she wrote novels such as “The Road Through the Wall (1948)” and thrillers “Hangsaman (1951),” “The Haunting of Hill House (1959),” and “We Have Always Lived in the Castle.” “The Lottery” made a great success in the New Yorker Magazine in 1948. This story was written to demonstrate “the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.”

The narrator of the Lottery is told in third person objective. You don’t see what’s in the mind of the characters, but you do

Mr. Summers is there to officiate the lottery and he also runs it as well. Mr. Summers calls all of the head of households to the black box. The black box holds slips of paper in it with one containing a black dot on it. Each person has to select a slip of paper from the box and once they’ve all selected their slip, they must open it to see who has been selected. Bill Hutchinson has been selected and immediately, his wife begins to protest. Five slips of paper are put into the box because there are five members of his family. They all select a slip of paper and Mrs. Hutchinson draws the slip with the black dot in the center of it. She is then stoned to death by the villagers. “Tess,” also known as Mrs. Hutchinson is the winner of the

Her father was Chilean and a cousin of Salvador Allende, who was elected president of Chile in 1970. When she was three, her parents divorced and her siblings and she moved with their mother to Chile, with her grandfather. Her mother remarried a Chilean diplomat in 1953. Isabel worked as a magazine and television journalist after she graduated high school in Chile. She left when her family left Chile in 1975 and moved to Venezuela for thirteen years. While there she still worked as a journalist. Her first novel evolved from letters that she wrote to her dying grandfather. This novel was called “The House of Spirits.” It was published in Spain in 1982 and three years later in English translation. It also became an international best seller. “Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses,” was written as an autobiography and family history due to the sickness of her daughter. Her books have been translated in over twenty different languages and have sold worldwide. She was awarded Chile’s National Literature Prize in 2010. She resides in San Rafael, California with her