The Lottery

No matter who the people in the culture are or the era in which they live in, there has always been abusive customs that are accepted. To challenge these fired up mindsets would be going against the grain. A prime example of this is in the short story "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson. In this story, an illustration draws out the brutal and villinious stoning of an unlucky woman. At first glance, I believe this strongly clashes with our contemporary values. A much deeper evaluation of the portrayal of swinging mindsets and how humans have the capacity to coincide with a mob mentality. As civilized and noble human beings, it's important to dissect and criticize the traditional values in the society described in the story "The Lottery" and others like it because we as a society play it out in reality. Judging the values that were portrayed in "The Lottery", its important to look back on our own history in the United States to compare and learn what we did wrong from our past mistakes. It would be wrong not to criticize these traditions because without being critical, we as humans may not progress past that point, allowing pillages to still take place.

Although the setting in the story isn't mentioned, there are many similarities to compare it is our own culture, in or around our period of time. In many ways, it seems that the culture described in "The Lottery" is not a specific culture but rather a universal one that can be applied to most of the western civilizations as history has characterized them. In other ways though, such as the how the story is written in english language and their speaking style is very similar to our own. Men are referred to as Mr. and the women are also formally referred to. The towns people assemble for dances, parties and halloween celebrations. Readers can relate the setting to be a setup in modern times. I believe this to be fitting!

Shirley Jackson published The Lottery in 1948, not long after the end of World War II when the