Symbolism And Irony In Shirley Jackson's The Lottery

Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery”, is about a small town that meets on June 27, a beautiful day, for the annual lottery. All 300 people in this town meet in the town square and draw slips of paper out of a box, awaiting the person to have the one with the black dot on their paper. Once they find that Tessie Hutchinson, a mom, and wife, pick the paper with the black dot the town crowds around her and begins throwing rocks, stoning her to death. Jackson manipulates her readers so well that they ignore the symbolism and irony throughout the story, making Jackson not create the outcome she intended after having read the story because of the shock factor at the end and the illogical storyline.
Starting that the very beginning Jackson managed to make the
story sound positive even with the title, making the reader think “The Lottery” meant someone was winning something. As the story continued the town impression seemed very realistic, friendly and neighborly as they gathered in the town square. Everyone in the town seemed to be going through a well-known routine. Then without warning, “in the midst of the ordinary, matter-of-fact environment, there occurs a terrifying cruel action, official, accepted, yet for the reader mysterious and unexplained.” (Heilman)
In the readers’ eyes, Jackson uses realism throughout the whole story up until the very end when it changes to symbolism. It catches the reader so off guard that the initial shock is so disturbing they don’t want to dig deeper into the meaning. If Jackson would have intentionally used the ‘sinister’ feeling earlier in the story than the reader would have known to look at it symbolically rather than feeling vulnerable and manipulated at the end of the story. (Heilman)
Before the reader gets to the end there is no reason to ask a ton of questions, everyone seems all too normal and in an annual impassive routine. The event takes no more than two hours so everyone can carry on with their day. Mr. Summers, the man who conducts the lottery, says “All right, folks… Let’s finish quickly.” (Jackson) He says it with no hesitation and no compassion for the woman who is about to die. Until you get to the end you don’t realize the “chilling callousness of this business-as-usual attitude” coming from the townspeople. (Friedman) The illogical point of view came from the readers right after they finished the story.
Because it didn’t seem like the author was writing in symbolism until the very end, the contrast between the holiday atmosphere and cheerfulness and the cruel horror that was actually going on was such a dramatic shock that readers thought ‘that is horrific and gruesome’ and ‘this would never happen’. (Heilman) If anything were unrealistic about the story it is that no one is trying to leave. If this were really going on people would try to go to a different town or try and escape the day before the lottery. Everyone is too willing to sacrifice themselves or their family members to ‘secure better crops’. Even in Aztec days, they had to guard the victim’s day and night so they didn’t escape before the ritual. This makes the story seem more symbolic rather than realistic. (Friedman) In conclusion, the paradox of the lottery is that the readers wanted the story to be positive from the beginning so badly that they skipped over the many bits of irony and symbolism within the story. Jackson was so careful with her wording that she made endless ways to interpret the meaning of this story, whether the readers realized it or
not.