Tradition In The Lottery By Shirley Jackson

Animals are controlled by other animals. The wolf pack follows the leader. The worker ants work at the cost of their lives to feed the queen ant. Though we believe we are higher than animals, humans are still animals. Every individual human does not always crave every answer to every question in the universe. Humans follow other humans for answers and directions. Traditions are beliefs that humans pass down to younger humans. The next generations are meant to follow these traditions, and it will always be that way. In “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, a grim tradition of murder is upheld by the town’s people simply because their ancestors did it.
“The Lottery” is a dark story about a small town that continues to practice a bizarre superstition only because it is a tradition. Everyone in the town picks a small piece of paper out of a beaten,
The fellow villagers will stone to death the person with the paper with the black dot. It does not matter if the victim is innocent or guilty, or a man, woman or child. In this story, it is chilling is that the town’s adults and children willingly and enthusiastically participate in this pointless murder every year. Everyone feels powerless to change the system, whether it is by changing the black box in which the papers are collected or by actually stopping the killings. However, no one actually thinks of changing the killings. At the beginning of the story when the reader does not know what the lottery is, the village seems nice and innocent. “Bobby Martin ducked under his mother's grasping hand and ran, laughing, back to the pile of stones.” The villagers do not know much about the origin or purpose of the