Emily Aguilar

Prof. Camila Alvarez

ENC 1101 TR 5:30-8:30pm

4 August 2015

756 Words

Interpretation Essay: A Lottery You Don’t Want to Win

Who in the world does not want to win the lottery? One usually views winning the lottery as a dream come true that will wipe away all their problems. However, one won’t want to participate in Shirley Jackson’s lottery. In this particular lottery, the one who wins is stoned to death. In “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, the themes of sex roles, tradition, and family helped show that the practice of the lottery created such ignorance and irony.

 

The theme of sex roles in “The Lottery” show how naive the villagers are by how they view women as inferior to men. The men inhabited responsibility in the town and were allowed to draw for their family in the lottery while the women just stand there not being able to say anything about the process. For example, when Jack Watson draws for his mother, the men in the village respond, “Glad to see your mother’s got a man to do it” ( Jackson 575). This further emphasizes that women had no power in the village and shows how they were controlled to do whatever a man told them to. In “The Lottery: Overview” critic Linda Wagner-Martin proclaims that “sons have priority as do children in general; mother, however, are expendables. The men in the story are looked upon as the head of the family and are cared about as much as children while the women are not important. The reader is able to see that a woman’s existence in the village is practically useless and if one was stoned, nobody would care. Ignorance can also further be seen by the story’s tradition.

Tradition in the story shows how ignorant the villagers were to change or get rid of their practice completely. Jackson makes the argument that some traditions are absolutely cruel and should be abandoned but the people in the village have gotten use to them, which makes it difficult for the villagers to disregard it. For instance, after Old Man Warner heard that some villages are talking about giving up the lottery, he exclaimed, “Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to go back to living in caves… There’s always been a lottery” (Jackson 576). The practice of the lottery has been around for a very long time that is has become a part of the villagers and they feel that it is extremely necessary to have. Critic Linda Wagner-Martin also states in that article “The Lottery: Overview” that “[Society] makes people behave, and forces established customs on them in lieu of the new.” The villagers grew up with this practice and don’t even try to stop it until they’re the ones being stoned. This shows how blind the villagers are to notice what they are doing is wrong. The shallowness of the villagers is recognized more through the story’s family theme.

The family theme in “The Lottery” displayed that family members did not care about their loved ones. The fact that even children participated in the practice of the lottery show that the villagers showed no remorse or guilt and how gruesome this practice was. For example, when Tessie Hutchingson was about to be stoned, someone gave her son “little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles” (Jackson 578). The villagers did not care about the value of family and enjoyed stoning each other even if it was a family member. In the article “Overview of ‘The Lottery’,” Jennifer Hicks feels that “the sense of guilt may be felt more by the reader of the story.” Jackson’s use of technique angers the reader into thinking that someone would actually feel absolutely nothing in murdering their parents, children, and other loved ones.

Ultimately, “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson creates much irony to reader by all the ignorance that the practice of the lottery created. One can see this ignorance through the story’s themes such as: sex roles, tradition, and family. The fact that a person can be kind to and joking around with a friend or family one minute to stoning them the next showed how quickly the villagers had a change of heart. Jackson’s story shows how humanity in real life can be so cruel and that people in society truly don’t care about anyone but themselves. She also tells readers that just because something has been around and done a certain way for a long time that there is not a better, more humane way of dealing with the issue. Her themes in the story made “The Lottery” one of the most gruesome stories ever written.