Morality In Shirley Jackson's The Lottery

“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson covers the issue of the human instinct to go along with the herd mentality and not question the ethics of a situation, often in order to be accepted by peers. This mentality is what causes stock market crashes. In the past it has gone to an extreme in situations like the holocaust, the Salem witch trials, and the French Revolution. The internet and Sporting events are less extreme examples of herd mentality. The story can be assumed to be based in the late 1940s, shortly after the war ended. However, the premise of the story resembles something of ancient Incan sacrifice, when townsfolk would give up a member of their community in order to have a more plentiful harvest (“The secrets of”). The reader will start
The day is described as “clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green.” (Jackson 1). The author uses irony at the end of the story to throw the reader off, twisting what we thought would be a happy experience to stoning. Mrs. Hutchinson ironically screams "It isn't fair, it isn't right"(Jackson 5) at the end of the story, despite the fact that if anyone else would have been picked, she would have participated. You would not expect this barbaric tradition from a town in the 1940s, with modern buildings, another example of irony in the story. The story has a heavy focus on symbolism, using the black box as a symbol for the unknown. When the box is brought out by Mr. Summers, it is described by the author as "no longer completely black but splintered badly along one side to show the original wood color"(Jackson 1) which shows how old and outdated the box really is, symbolizing the tradition. The villagers are so opposed to changing the tradition that they do not even want to make a new box or repaint it, blindly just following the tradition because that is what everyone does, perhaps out of fear that if they changed, something bad would