“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson: A Brutal Tradition

593 Words2 Pages

The famous civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. once said: “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people,” capturing the main message of the short story “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson, perfectly, because of the themes of peer pressure and tradition present throughout the story. In this story, the people of a small village gather for their annual tradition, a lottery, in which one person is picked at random out of a box containing each of the villagers’ names. The village, which is not specifically named, seems like any other historic village at first, with the women gossiping, the men talking, and the children playing, but soon takes a sinister turn when it is revealed that the “winner” of the lottery is not truly a winner at all; he or she is stoned to death by everyone else in the village. The purpose in this is not directly mentioned in the text, and the reader is left to wonder about the message the story is trying to convey. But there is no purpose; instead, the lottery is meant as a thinly veile...

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