Jennifer Hicks, a writing instructor and director of Academic Support and Writing Assessment at Massachusetts Bay Community College in Wellesley, MA, analyzes crafting of “The Lottery” and the meaning within the text. She believes the story is very gruesome and inhumane by how story shows no guilt in their practice due to the fact that children are being taught to participate and how much the villagers enjoy the practice. Hicks also sees that in the story men are superior to women because they are the ones who organize the lottery, and that the tradition of the lottery has become extremely important to the villagers.

 

Fritz Oehlschlaeger views Jackson ’s design of the lottery process in “The Lottery” as a key to the story’s meaning. He says that the primary focus of the story is women being inferior to men because throughout the story the women are just standing there while the men do all the work to prepare the lottery. He believes the more children a women has, the better chance she has of surviving the lottery.

 

 

Linda Wagner-Martin believes that much of Shirley Jackson’s writings are dark and unrealistic because she lived a depressing life. She interprets from “The Lottery” that women did not have a say in the process and weren’t considered important in the village. She believes that the villagers were ignorant for continuing their tradition and that the killing of a family member creates such irony in the story.