Tradition And Murder In Shirley Jackson's The Lottery

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Blinded By The Past: Tradition and Murder in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”

Everyone has traditions, whether it is one that is done daily such as setting the table before dinner or a tradition that is only done once or twice a year such as putting up an angel on your Christmas tree. We follow our traditions blindly and without hesitation just because that is what we have always done. In Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery”, this small village performs the same grueling tradition every year. At random, through “The Lottery” one of the villagers are murdered by the town every year. Jackson’s message that following tradition purposelessly can be dangerous and the evils of indiscriminate persecution is elucidated in her short story “The Lottery”. …show more content…

Jackson is showing that the tradition of “The Lottery” is not only local but widespread as well in her short story. Throughout the story there are several traditions the villagers have kept going over time; as well as, many traditions they found had became irrelevant or unconventional such as “having slips of paper substituted for the chips of wood that had been used for generations...but now that the population was more than three hundred and likely to keep on growing, it was necessary to use something that would fit more easily into the black box” (Jackson). However, their most kept tradition and their most dangerous one is “The

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