Tone is The Foundation for “The Lottery”

Tone is The Foundation for “The Lottery”

In literature, tone is often described as the attitude of the story. It is the method used by the author to add personality or emotion. Without tone, even the best-rounded characters can easily come across as flat. Tone is not simply style, diction, or setting, but instead is the tool that holds all of these pieces together. In, “The Lottery”, author Shirley Jackson’s use of tone not only leads the reader down a familiar easy path to follow, but also sets the stage for the climactic change in events that leaves the reader’s emotions spiraling out of control.

The ability to take a reader by the hand and walk them through a comfortably recognizable setting only to leave them asking in the end, “What just happened?”, is often referred to as simply a plot twist, but without the proper tone having been set beforehand, this twist would fall short of the desired effect. In “The Lottery”, the tone used to describe the initial setting, the townspeople’s attitude toward the lottery, and then the description of the stark realization that someone is going to die, provides evidence of tone’s ability to not only disarm the reader, but allow the author to extract the desired emotional response.

Jackson’s attempt to lull the reader into comfortable familiar surroundings is evidenced from the very beginning. Using, “The morning of June 27 was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green” (250) as her opening sentence, Jackson leads one to reminisce of pleasant summers past. Although she does immediately follow this statement with the first mention of the lottery, before the reader is given the time to actually process i...

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...tics, and even other authors have come to their own conclusions regarding this issue and opinions are as varied as the questions. It is my contention that the tone the author chose to use is the true culprit. By establishing a tone in the beginning of the story that is in such diametric opposition of the actual events portrayed, the reader is left with little time to process the contradiction between the events expected and those delivered. The author’s ability to construct these contradictions is a testament to the value and importance of tone.

Works Cited

Jackson, Shirley. ”The Lottery.” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. Ed. X. J., Kennedy and Dana Gioia.7th ed. Boston, MA: Longman Pub Group, 2012. 250-256.Print.

Timko, Michael. "The Lottery." World and I Feb. 2013. Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 10 Feb. 2014.