Shirley Jackson Comparison

The Vietnam War called for the 1969 Draft Lottery due to a shortage of

“The Lottery” Interpretive Essay “The Lottery”, a short story by Shirley Jackson, is about a lottery that takes place in a small village. The story starts of with the whole town gathering in the town square, where Mr. Summers, the official, holds the lottery. After that, every family draws out of an old black box, and a certain family gets picked. Out of the certain family, one person gets picked as the unlucky “winner” of the lottery. In this short story, after the Hutchinson family gets drawn, Tessie Hutchinson is declared “winner” of the lottery.

They required information varying from your name to your physical description. A Selective Service registration number, age, date and place of birth, ethnicity and place of residence at time of registration were all required on the draft card. If a mans name was drawn he was required to report to his local draft board for evaluation which was made up of community members who usually had political ties within the community. Men were allowed to get out of being drafted if their religion was against it, they were injured or health problems, needed at home to support their families, or were wealthy and educated. Some men would run away to Canada to get away from being drafted and were known as Draft

The story of The Lottery instantly reminded me of The Hunger Games as well. There are some very visible parallels between The Lottery and the reaping ceremonies of The Hunger Games. In both cases innocent people are selected at random to be killed and there 's nothing that can be done about it. Very similarly, each year people gather in their town square to meet their fates. We don 't know when the tradition of the lottery started and it 's impossible to know when it will end.

‘The Lottery’ is a story about tradition and sacrifice. However, even though the NY times article is about sacrifice, they are for different things. Such as money vs. good luck. ‘The Lottery’ talks about this small, peaceful village that have no problems and has mainly positive dialogue. But this village has this really weird tradition.

The Lottery is a short story about a town of people that will crowd and all the men will get a slip of paper all the paper is blank… besides one and that one has a black dot, so a lucky person will get it and if they have a kid older than 16 they have play this game, anyway the winner will get a “prize”. The Lottery story and The Lottery movie have many things that were different. The Lottery story is different from The Lottery movie by where it is located and where the event took place, such as in the story they were sacrificing someone in a large field while in the movie they were stopped by the building. If they didn’t have the building in the way she could have lived longer while if they did she would have died sooner.

It was almost a way of life and if it was not followed there were dire consequences. The story starts to become ironic when specified what the lottery really means to them. A lottery, in any other community, is seen as a chance to win rewards that are in your favor. Within this town, it’s a chance to murder a single person every year. The main idea Jackson make in “The Lottery” is that people can come to together to perform this terrible act and then completely forget about.

Reading Level (Lexile): 1230. , Database: MasterFILE Premier This source is incredible for its incredible recognition of the irony and symbolism that is represented in “The Lottery”. The source really states that the “The Lottery” is the underpinning definition of post-World War 2. The date of the lottery and irony of the characters names that Shirley Jackson presents, all convey a meaning that is even more shocking than the conclusion of the story.

Yet Jackson wrote "The Lottery" in 1948—before gang violence, teen suicides, the threat of nuclear war, and handgun crimes reached epidemic proportions. Was Jackson looking into the future of the American society?"(Hicks). The story of the lottery truly could be foreshadowing of the future and how we nowadays are. We don’t see the importance of each other's life, no matter if it's one person or a hundred. We would sacrifice each other to fill our own foolish greed.

Shirley Jackson's The Lottery is about analyzing traditional social and class divisions. Because the story is asking us to think about the ceremony and traditions that we careless following as members of our society. The story is analysis the ways custom is concealed right and wrong, the lottery is becoming a way to analysis social and class divisions. The random samples of paper mean that some of the family are fortunate and that others aren’t fortunate.

The tradition of the lottery has been carried out for so long in this village that nobody even knows the reason for its occurring in the first place and nobody questions it. When Old Man Warner, the oldest man in the village, is told about other villages giving up the tradition of the lottery, he says that they are, “[A] pack of crazy fools [...]. There [has] always been a lottery [...]” (Jackson, 4). There is no reason why there has always been a lottery except that every year on June 27th, they held the lottery.

Thematic similarities between Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat” and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” After reading the short stories, “Sweat” by Zora Neale Hurston, and “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, one would see striking similarities. Although the stories reflect different times and cultures, the theme of irony seem to parallel throughout both work. Both stories, share plots and characters that seem to contradict what one would expect. Both stories begin by introducing the setting, which includes not only dates, times and locations, but also the season. Both writers wish to convey some sort of feeling.

This story still remains relevant in comparison to today. Simple towns people who speak to each other on a daily basis and joke around with each other all of the sudden turn around and kill one of their one. This story symbolized the change of heart within people when events go on. With various symbols, Shirley Jackson created the short story, The Lottery, to show society and what it has been and what it could be. One might even say that Jackson wanted to keep it in the mind of a ‘modern’ society that such things could happen again.

As ‘The Lottery’ is a short story, the author doesn’t expound each and every detail. There is a ‘vacuum’ in the story, but it is a desirable vacuum. It leaves a room for diverse imaginations, accommodating an active participation of its readers. For example, the author doesn’t give much information about the lottery or characters. All we know about the lottery is that it is an old tradition that involves

The short story, The Lottery appeared on the June 26, 1948 edition of The New Yorker. Although the subscribers noticed nothing different about this edition of The New Yorker, it contained a story that would arouse divergent feelings among the readers and the public in equal measure. In fact, this story continues to elicit these feeling even in the 21st century, resulting in heated debates whenever the story comes up. It remains as controversial a story as it was more than half a century ago. The initial reaction after the initial publishing of the story was widespread outcry, which made Shirley Jackson, the author, a literary villain.