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The Lottery
Thematically, the dangers of indoctrination and conditioned, ritualized behavior—what Emerson called "the opium of custom"—are exemplified in the disturbing narrative of "The Lottery," a story...
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Literature
In a broad, general sense, the lottery system from the story represents old traditions that people blindly follow for the sake of following tradition. The people in the story do the lottery and...
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The Lottery
Connotation is the meaning associated with a word or phrase that goes beyond the literal or denotative meaning. Shirley Jackson uses connotation in several ways in her classic short story. One of...
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The Lottery
The children are probably intended to represent the next generation of citizens who are being taught how to participate in the annual lottery. It is because each new generation of children is...
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The Lottery
Via Merriam-Webster: Indoctrinate: to teach (someone) to fully accept the ideas, opinions, and beliefs of a particular group and to not consider other ideas, opinions, and beliefs The easiest way...
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The Lottery
The point of view of "The Lottery" is the third person point of view. A third person point of view places the narrator outside of the events happening in the story. The narrator obviously knows...
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The Lottery
In "The Lottery," author Shirley Jackson uses descriptions of mundane details to make the village seem "normal." The entire first paragraph could be plucked out of this story and used to describe...
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The Lottery
Old Man Warner's comments suggest that the Lottery ritual may have started as a human sacrifice to the gods of the harvest and fertility. He seems to tie the labor of farming and cultivated crops...
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The Lottery
This is an interesting question! One of the major cultural institutions this story could be satirizing and commenting on is the military draft. The United States instituted the draft in 1940, and...
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The Lottery
I believe the lottery in this story is taking place in a small town in the northeast United States. Some of this is based on explicit statements, like the way Jackson calls the place a "village."...
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The Lottery
Tessie Hutchinson arrives late. Author Shirley Jackson devotes two paragraphs to Tessie's arrival and her immersion into the crowd, beginning with the following sentence: Just as Mr. Summers...
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The Lottery
Jackson deliberately refrains from letting the reader know that the lottery in her story ends with a brutal death by stoning because she wants to surprise and shock the reader and because she wants...
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The Lottery
Most of the words that come out of Tessie Hutchinson's mouth are basically complaints about the fairness of the process of the lottery. That, in itself, shows the asinine nature of the practice,...
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The Lottery
The narrator informs us that other people feel sorry for Mr. Summers because "he had no children and his wife was a scold." They probably also feel sorry for him because he has to perform the...
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The Lottery
The black box used for the annual lottery drawing was in dilapidated condition because it was so old. Shirley Jackson describes it as follows. The black box grew shabbier each year: by now it was...
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The Lottery
One of the fascinating aspects of Shirley Jackson's short story, "The Lottery," is the strong adherence to tradition evinced by the actions and words of the townspeople before, during, and after...
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The Lottery
In "The Lottery," Jackson does not reveal for how long the lottery has been played by the townspeople. We can infer its history, however, based on some details from the story. Old Man Warner, for...
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The Lottery
I always connect "The Lottery" with Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." These stories are both based on the idea that if we sacrifice one person, everyone else can have a good...
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The Lottery
When someone misses the drawing, another family member must draw on his or her behalf. During the proceedings, Mr. Summers, the man who presides over the lottery, must ensure that everyone is...
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The Lottery
Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" is meant to demonstrate the negative impacts of blindly following "tradition" and avoiding societal change. In the story, the lottery is a traditional event that...
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The Lottery
The protagonist is the most prominent, or central, character in a story. The protagonist of the short story "The Lottery" is Tessie, but she is a representative of the whole village. All the...
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The Lottery
Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" is a powerful argument against ritual and tradition. She is not arguing that all traditions and ceremonies are inherently evil. What she is showing us is that...
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The Lottery
I think the village still needs a scapegoat because they are keeping up old and archaic traditions for the sake of tradition. The story hints at an original reason for the lottery. Mr. Adams is...
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The Lottery
Old Man Warner appears to be opposed to getting rid of the annual lottery mainly because he enjoys it. It provides excitement in his otherwise dull existence. We can see how much he enjoys the...
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The Lottery
An adage is used when Mr. Adams speaks with Old Man Warner, who has participated in the lottery 77 times. Mr. Adams informs Old Man Warner that the community in the northern village is considering...
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The Lottery
The official date for the annual lottery was June 27th. More populous villages start the ceremony a few days earlier so the climax coincides with the official date. The village in the center of the...
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The Lottery
There are several hints given in the story about why the village still participates in the lottery, but the main reason seems to be that it's always been done that way, and no one questions or...
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Reference
The lottery took place on June 27th in the village square. In more populous villages, the lottery took longer to conduct and started two days before the official date. The village in the center of...
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The Lottery
Upon first glance, there doesn't seem to be much purpose for the lottery. The people in the story seem to remember there was once a reason for the lottery, but the system has been going on for so...
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The Lottery
One characteristic the villagers seem to value, in addition to respect for tradition, is conformity. Each person who comes to participate in the drawings and the stoning seems to be doing so...
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The Lottery
Flashbacks occur when the author or narrator takes the reader back in time to explain certain events connected to the story. Flashbacks play an important role in plot development, and the...
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The Lottery
While the easiest way to approach the cultural aspects of "The Lottery" is to look at the connection between the story and the persecution of Jews in Germany—completely decent-seeming people...
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The Lottery
If the question is asking about the possibility of viewing the lottery system from Jackson's short story as collective murder, then I say the answer is yes. I think the societal stoning to death...
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The Lottery
In the fifth paragraph of Jackson's "The Lottery," the word "tradition" appears as follows: "no one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box." In the story, the...
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The Lottery
There are actually two drawings in the lottery. The first drawing is only for heads of households. The black box contains only as many slips as there are households in the little community. All of...
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The Lottery
Three character traits of Tessie Hutchinson are tardiness, resistance, and suppression. Tardiness Mrs. Hutchinson is late arriving at the designated place where the annual lottery is held. She...
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The Lottery
From her first appearance in the story, Tessie is shown to be a charismatic character. She shows up late to the lottery, but her absence doesn't go unnoticed. When she finally arrives, the crowd is...
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The Lottery
The exact purpose of the lottery is nebulous, but apparently it was started as some sort of superstition-based ceremony to ensure crops would grow and produce a sizable yield. Now, it has simply...
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The Lottery
In Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," the village members largely conform to the practice of the lottery because the villagers have done so for generations. Characters like Old Man Warner are...
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The Lottery
The exact purpose of the lottery held in Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" is never explained. It seems like the lottery is so old that none of the townspeople can even remember why it began. This...
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The Lottery
In Jackson's "The Lottery" and Rushdie's "Imagine no heaven," external forces play a large role in regulating a person's identity. The external forces that Jackson and Rushdie see as forming...
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The Lottery
In Tan's "Two Kinds" and Jackson's "The Lottery," social expectation regulates in self-definition. Social expectation plays a large role in forming June's identity and in guiding Suyan's hopes for...
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The Lottery
What you have placed in quotation marks is not from "The Lottery" itself. I am going to assume this is your writing prompt, a brief summary of what might be an external conflict, and I've revised...
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The Lottery
The Martins are the town grocers. While everyone else avoids the lottery, they seem to want to be involved in it. They even keep the box in their store sometimes. This demonstrates that not...
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The Lottery
The village should give up the tradition of the lottery because it is barbaric. It is wrong to kill people for no reason. The town holds on to the tradition because the townspeople are afraid to...
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Inherit the Wind
We can see the themes of scapegoating an individual and the mistakes of the community in Jackson's "The Lottery" and Lawrence and Lee's Inherit the Wind. The theme of a community needing a...
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The Lottery
If Mrs. Hutchinson had failed to show up, her husband would have drawn for her. Mrs. Hutchinson is almost late on lottery day. She comes rushing in after everyone has assembled and says she forgot...
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The Lottery
Shirley Jackson's 1948 short story The Lottery begins in a quaint village where everyone is gathering for an annual ritual; the lottery. The old box where slips of paper are drawn is brought to...
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The Lottery
In Shirley Jackson's disturbing story, the characters are differentiated from one another by their attitudes about the lottery. And, while there are some points that may be interpreted as...
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The Lottery
"The Lottery" almost could have been written to explicate aspects of deconstruction. Someone like Derrida would probably object to using the word "applied" to his thought, as if it were a set of...