The Lottery Shirley Jackson Analysis

Sociologist Edward Shils defined tradition as, "It is anything which is transmitted or handed down from the past to the present" (Shils 12).In other words, a tradition could be any material or intangible attributes handed down by one generation to the next. On the other hand, anything which was handed down from the past generations is not a tradition. The validity of a tradition is established through the process of thoughts, imagination and actions of past generations. On his book "Tradition", Edward Shils wrote, "The presence of something from the past does not entail any explicit expectation that it should be accepted, appreciated, reenacted, or otherwise assimilated" (Shils 12). Reevaluation of the validity of a tradition is not always performed. As a result, traditions keep getting reenacted and
In the short story "The Lottery" and "Everyday Use", both writers depicted the bad and ugly side of reenacting and appreciating tradition that lost its validity. In the short story "The Lottery", Shirley Jackson wrote about a tradition of stoning people to death. Use stoning as a punishment is not unearthly and it is practiced in some part of the world. In the case of short story "The Lottery", the tradition of choosing someone using a random selection process or lottery and kill that person by stoning was never practiced in reality. Shirley Jackson wrote a make believe story of a cruel and merciless tradition that was practiced for generations that also shows how traditions can be impartial and fair to everyone. In the short story "The Lottery" few other traditions were mentioned and described.