by Amelia Tibbett

Created on: January 17, 2008

Written in 1948, The Lottery, by Shirley Jackson is a work of fiction that demonstrates conformity and rebellion while suggesting that the lottery is a ritualistic ceremony. Born in 1919, Jackson struggled her whole life with depression. Her marriage to Stanley Edgar Hyman produced four children, and Jackson maintained a tedious writing career during her marriage resulting in four novels.

The Lottery focuses around a village on the day of their annual Lottery. The purpose of The Lottery is to ensure enough rain to have a good corn crop the following June. Basically, the story evolves around the misguided belief that if the villagers sacrifice one of their own to what readers are led to believe is a Rain God, then they will have good crops the next year. They believe that if they do not do this, then they will regress to hard times. The town patriarch Old Man Warner sums this up:

"Pack of crazy fools, Listening to young folks, northing's good enough for them.
Next thing you know, they'll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody
work anymore, live that way for awhile. Used to be a saying about 'Lottery in
June, corn be heavy soon.' First thing you know, we'd all be eating stewed chickweed
and acorns. There's always been a lottery."

In The Lottery, the readers are deceptively led down a path to believe that June 27th is just as normal as any other day in this particular village. The tone is easy going, people seem to be going about business as usual. "The whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o'clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner." That is how insignificantly unimportant they make you feel about the event, that it is just a brief event that will be had, but should not disrupt the other necessary events of the day, especially the noon meal. Even the fact that the boys are collecting rocks is made to seem nothing more than child's play. "Bobby and Harry Jones and Dickie Delacroix-The villagers pronounced his name "Dellacroy" - eventually made a great pile of stones in one corner of the square and guarded it against the rids of the other boys." At this point in the story, it is never eluded to that these stones will eventually become the tortuous demise of Mrs. Tessie Hutchinson.

The tone of the story evolves into one of panic the further along we go. As the story moves along, there does become a sense of urgency, after each of the towns people have drawn their slips

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