Mortality And Tradition In Shirley Jackson's The Lottery

The Lottery
Perspective on Mortality and Tradition.
“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson is nothing less than a powerful story about a society that gathers once per year and holds a lottery. But this is not a lottery with a winner; it is a lottery with a loser. “The Lottery” is a chilling story because it depicts a sense of normalcy among the towns’ people when they randomly decided to kill a neighbor by practically just drawing straws. This story really asks the question, are rituals always a good thing? If rituals are a good or bad thing do we even know why we do it half the time? “The Lottery”, shows us that even though tradition may have been happening for years doesn’t mean that the traditions we choose to follow are beneficial.
Just
as you start to read the story the sense of calm is apparent: it’s as if the day is no different from any other summer day. Shirley Jackson begins the story by stating, “The Children assemble first, of course they broke out into boisterous play” while they still talked about the school year that just ended a short while before, the men gathered shortly after the children cracking soft jokes and speaking of “planting and rain, tractors and taxes.” These images that Shirley Jackson paints depict a normal day in a small town where people are meeting to conduct normal activities, people aren’t struggling with their mortality at all; which is very strange given the circumstances that anyone, even their own children could be picked to lose the lottery. When Mr. Summers (a childless business owner with a nagging wife) who is in charge of the lottery approaches the town center with the black box and sets it down on the stool. The villagers show their first sense of mortality and fear towards the black box by keeping their distance from it. The black box was used even before Old-Man-Warner was born. (Old-Man-Warner, the oldest man in village, represents the way things used to be done). Mr. Summers continuously pushed to have the black box replaced, but the subject always died down before anything was done about it. Shirley Jackson portrays the difficulties Mr. Summers had with his successful transition to paper, form wood chips that were placed in the black box for the drawing of the lottery drawing; Summers explanation was “chip’s of wood had been all very well when the village was tiny, 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.” When the lottery commences Mrs.
Hutchinson runs to the town square to calmly explain that she forgot what day it was and enthusiastically cracks a joke to Mr. Summers saying, “wouldn’t have me leave m’dishes in the sink, now, would you Joe?” Once everyone in town is there, except a man with a broken leg, the lottery starts and Mr. Summers calls out every family name and the head of each household walks up and grabs a slip of paper. Once everyone has their slip of folded paper the townsfolk continue to open the paper. Soon they find that the family that lost is the Hutchinson’s. Mrs. Hutchinson’s attitude abruptly changes. What was once an enthusiastic tone turns into a plea. She tells Mr. Summers that he rushed Mr. Hutchinson and didn’t give him enough time to choose the paper he wanted. As the second round of the lottery commences, just within the Hutchinson family, Mrs. Hutchinson, upset, keeps claiming it wasn’t fair. Each member of the family took a slip of folded paper from the black box; first the children open theirs to show the crowd that their pieces of paper are blank; then Mr. Hutchinson opened his to reveal that his paper is blank as well. Once everyone realizes that Mrs. Hutchinson is the one who lost the lottery, she fails to show her paper to the crowd and her husband has to go to her and grab the paper out of her hand to show the that she has lost the lottery. As the crowd formed around her she is still begging for her life saying that it wasn’t fair
while a stone struck her in the head. I find a lot of irony in Mrs. Hutchinson as she approached the center of town as a free spirited well spoken women not worried about the lottery one bit, and ended up being the one who lost it and begging for her life and eventually losing that as well. Old-Man-Warner represents the past.
Someone mentions to him that in the village up north they’re talking of giving up the lottery, but Old-Man-Warner quickly shoots that idea down calling them crazy adding that soon “they’ll be wanting to go back and live in caves”. That statement is interesting because in his mind it uncivilized to stop the lottery. Old-Man-Warner continues to say that there used to be a saying “Lottery in June corn be heavy soon” and he doesn’t think it’ll be worth giving it up to eat “chickweed and acorns”. Even when Mrs. Adams points out “some places have already quit lotteries” Mr. Warner, says in a resolute manner that they’re a “pack of young fools”. Old-Man-Warner is very stuck in his ways, as people even suggest new ideas about stopping the lottery he quickly calls them fools and naïve. It’s clear that he believes that the comfortable lifestyle that they have is because of the lottery and it keeps society progressing, and without it they wouldn’t be in the same place
economically. I love this short story; it’s a great representation of the fact that we don’t consider our mortality until it’s looking us straight in the eye just like Mrs. Hutchinson did. It also shows that we are connected to traditions that have no benefits at all just like Old-Man-Warner. This story also points out that the people who lead the community like Mr. Summers that have a frightening amount of power through his in complete control of the lottery.

Works Cited
"Free Audio Friday: The Lottery." Elizabeth Klett. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Nov. 2013.
"The Lottery Thesis Statements and Important Quotes | PaperStarter.com." PaperStartercom. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Nov. 2013.
SparkNotes. SparkNotes, n.d. Web. 19 Nov. 2013.