analytical essay on the lottery

A Summary and Analysis of Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Lottery’ is the best-known story of the American writer Shirley Jackson. Published in the New Yorker in 1948 and collected in The Lottery and Other Stories , the story is about a village where an annual lottery is drawn. However, the fate of the person who draws the ‘winning’ slip is only revealed at the end of the story in a dark twist.

‘The Lottery’ forces us to address some unpleasant aspects of human nature, such as people’s obedience to authority and tradition and their willingness to carry out evil acts in the name of superstition.

You can read ‘The Lottery’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis of Jackson’s story below. You might also be interested in the following articles we have written on other aspects of the story:

‘The Lottery’: key quotes explained

‘The Lottery’: key themes discussed

‘The Lottery’: main symbols

But for the present, let’s start with a brief summary of the plot of the story.

‘The Lottery’: plot summary

The story takes place one morning between ten o’clock and noon on 27 June, in a village somewhere in (presumably) the USA. The year is not stated. The three hundred villagers are gathering to undertake the annual ritual of the lottery, which is always drawn on this date every year. Some of the children of the village are busy making a pile of stones which they closely guard in the corner of the village square.

The lottery is led by a Mr Summers, who has an old black box. Inside the black box, slips of paper have been inserted, all of them blank apart from one. The head of each household, when called up to the box by Mr Summers, has to remove one slip of paper.

When every household has drawn a slip of paper, the drawn slips are opened. It is discovered that Bill Hutchinson has drawn the marked slip of paper, and it is explained that, next, one person from within his family must be chosen. His family comprises five people: himself, his wife Tessie, and their three children, Bill Jr., Nancy, and Dave.

Bill’s wife, Tessie, isn’t happy that her family has been chosen, and calls for the lottery to be redrawn, claiming that her husband wasn’t given enough time to choose his slip of paper. But the lottery continues: now, each of the five members of the Hutchinson household must draw one slip from the black box. One slip will be marked while the others are not.

Each of the Hutchinsons draw out a slip of paper, starting with the youngest of the children. When they have all drawn a slip, they are instructed to open the folded pieces of paper they have drawn. All of them are blank except for Tessie’s, which has a black mark on it which Mr Summers had made with his pencil the night before.

Now, the significance of the pile of stones the children had been making at the beginning of the story becomes clear. Each of the villagers picks up a stone and they advance on Tessie, keen to get the business over with. One of the villagers throws a stone at Tessie’s head. She protests that this isn’t right and isn’t fair, but the villagers proceed to hurl their stones, presumably stoning her to death.

‘The Lottery’: analysis

‘The Lottery’ is set on 27 June, and was published in the 26 June issue of the New Yorker in 1948. Perhaps surprisingly given its status as one of the canonical stories of the twentieth century, the story was initially met with anger and even a fair amount of hate mail from readers, with many cancelling their subscriptions. What was it within the story that touched a collective nerve?

We may scoff at the Carthaginians sacrificing their children to the gods or the Aztecs doing similar, but Jackson’s point is that every age and every culture has its own illogical and even harmful traditions, which are obeyed in the name of ‘tradition’ and in the superstitious belief that they have a beneficial effect.

To give up the lottery would, in the words of Old Man Warner, be the behaviour of ‘crazy fools’, because he is convinced that the lottery is not only beneficial but essential to the success of the village’s crops. People will die if the lottery is not drawn, because the crops will fail and people will starve as a result. It’s much better to people like Old Man Warner that one person be chosen at random (so the process is ‘fair’) and sacrificed for the collective health of the community.

There are obviously many parallels with other stories here, as well as various ethical thought experiments in moral philosophy. The trolley problem is one. A few years after Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ was published, Ray Bradbury wrote a story, ‘ The Flying Machine ’, in which a Chinese emperor decides it is better that one man be killed (in order to keep the secret of the flying machine concealed from China’s enemies) than that the man be spared and his invention fall into the wrong hands and a million people be killed in an enemy invasion.

But what makes the lottery in Jackson’s story even more problematic is that there is no evidence that the stoning of one villager does affects the performance of the village crops. Such magical thinking obviously belongs to religious superstition and a belief in an intervening God who demands a sacrifice in recognition of his greatness before he will allow the crops to flourish and people to thrive.

Indeed, in the realms of American literature, such superstition is likely to put us in mind of a writer from the previous century, Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose tales (see ‘ The Minister’s Black Veil ’ for one notable example) often tap into collective superstitions and beliefs among small religious communities in America’s Puritan past.

But even more than Hawthorne, we might compare Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ with a couple of other twentieth-century stories. The first is another ‘lottery’ story and perhaps the most notable precursor to Jackson’s: Jorge Luis Borges’ 1941 story ‘ The Lottery in Babylon ’, which describes a lottery which began centuries ago and has been going on ever since. Although this lottery initially began as a way of giving away prizes, it eventually developed so that fines would be given out as well as rewards.

In time, participation in the lottery became not optional but compulsory. The extremes between nice prizes and nasty surprises, as it were, became more pronounced: at one end, a lucky winner might be promoted to a high office in Babylon, while at the other end, they might be killed.

Borges’ story is widely regarded as an allegory for totalitarianism, and it’s worth bearing in mind that it was published during the Second World War. Jackson’s lottery story, of course, was published just three years after the end of the war, when news about the full horrors of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust were only beginning to emerge in full.

Hannah Arendt, whose The Origins of Totalitarianism was published three years after ‘The Lottery’, would later coin the phrase ‘ banality of evil ’ to describe figures like Adolf Eichmann who had presided over the Nazi regime. Such men were not inherently evil, but were aimless and thoroughly ordinary individuals who drifted towards tyranny because they sought power and direction in their lives.

What is Jackson’s story if not the tale of decent and ordinary people collectively taking part in a horrific act, the scapegoating of an individual? Jackson’s greatest masterstroke in ‘The Lottery’ is the sketching in of the everyday details, as though we’re eavesdropping on the inhabitants of a Brueghel painting, so that the villagers strike us as both down-to-earth, ordinary people and yet, at the same time, people we believe would be capable of murder simply because they didn’t view it as such.

These are people who clearly know each other well, families whose children have grown up together, yet they are prepared to turn on one of their neighbours simply because the lottery decrees it. And the villagers may breathe a collective sigh of relief when little Dave, the youngest of the Hutchinson children, reveals his slip of paper to be blank, but Jackson leaves us in no doubt that they would have stoned him if he had been the unlucky victim.

And the other story with which a comparative analysis of ‘The Lottery’ might be undertaken is another tale about the idea of the scapegoat : Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1973 story, ‘ The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas ’. In Le Guin’s story, the inhabitants of a fictional city, Omelas, enjoy happy and prosperous lives, but only because a child is kept in a state of perpetual suffering somewhere in the city. This miserable child is imprisoned and barely kept alive: the price the inhabitants of Omelas willingly pay for their own bliss.

Or is it? One of the intriguing details of Le Guin’s story is whether we are truly in a magical realm where this one child’s suffering makes everyone else’s joy possible, or whether this is merely – as in Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ – what the townspeople tell themselves .

Just as men like Old Warner cannot even countenance the idea of abandoning the lottery (imagine if the crops failed!), the people of Omelas cannot even entertain the notion that their belief in their scapegoat may be founded on baseless superstition. They’re making the child suffer, in other words, for nothing, just as Tessie Hutchinson is sacrificed for nothing: the crops will fail or flourish regardless. There are no winners in Jackson’s lottery: just three hundred losers.

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Home › Literature › Analysis of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery

Analysis of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 28, 2021

As were many of Shirley Jackson’s stories, “The Lottery” was first published in the New Yorker  and, subsequently, as the title story of The Lottery: or, The Adventures of James Harris in 1949. It may well be the world’s most frequently anthologized short story. A modern horror story, it derives its effect from a reversal of the readers’ expectations, already established by the ordinary setting of a warm June day in a rural community. Readers, lulled into this false summer complacency, begin to feel horror, their moods changing with the narrator’s careful use of evidence and suspense, until the full realization of the appalling ritual murder bursts almost unbearably on them.

The story opens innocently enough, as the townspeople gather for an unidentified annual event connected to the harvest. The use of names initially seems to bolster the friendliness of the gathering; we feel we know these people as, one by one, their names are called in alphabetical order. In retrospect, however, the names of the male lottery organizers—Summer and Graves—provide us with clues to the transition from life to death. Tessie, the soon-to-be-victim housewife, may allude to another bucolic Tess (in Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles ), whose promising beginnings transformed into gore and death at the hands of men.

Shirley Jackson/Erich Hartmann

The scholar and critic Linda Wagner-Martin observes that only recently have readers noticed the import of the sacrificial victim’s gender: In the traditional patriarchal system that values men and children, mothers are devalued once they have fulfilled their childbearing roles. Tessie, late to the gathering because her arms were plunged to the elbow in dishwater, seems inconsequential, even irritating, at first. Only as everyone in the town turns against her— children, men, other women invested in the system that sustains them—does the reader become aware that this is a ritual stoning of a scapegoat who can depend on no one: not her daughter, not her husband, not even her little boy, Davy, who picks up an extraordinarily large rock to throw at her.

No reader can finish this story without contemplating the violence and inhumanity that Jackson intended it to portray. In the irony of its depiction lies the horror of this classic tale and, one hopes, a careful reevaluation of social codes and meaningless rituals.

Analysis of Shirley Jackson’s Stories

https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-authors-voice/a-m-homes-reads-shirley-jackson-the-lottery

BIBLIOGRAPHY Jackson, Shirley. The Lottery: or, The Adventures of James Harris. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1949. Wagner-Martin, Linda. “The Lottery.” In Reference Guide to Short Fiction, edited by Noelle Watson, 783–784. Detroit: St. James Press, 1994.

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Analysis of 'The Lottery' by Shirley Jackson

Taking Tradition to Task

ThoughtCo / Hilary Allison

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When Shirley Jackson's chilling story "The Lottery" was first published in 1948 in The New Yorker , it generated more letters than any fiction the magazine had ever published. Readers were furious, disgusted, occasionally curious, and almost uniformly bewildered.

Public outcry over the story can be partly attributed to The New Yorker 's practice at the time of publishing works without identifying them as fact or fiction. Readers were also presumably still reeling from the horrors of World War II. Yet, though times have changed and we all now know the story is fiction, "The Lottery" has maintained its grip on readers decade after decade.

"The Lottery" is one of the most widely known stories in American literature and culture. It has been adapted for radio, theater, television, and even ballet. The Simpsons television show referenced the story in its "Dog of Death" episode in season three.

"The Lottery" is available to subscribers of The New Yorker and The Lottery and Other Stories , a collection of Jackson's work with an introduction by the writer A. M. Homes. You can hear Homes read and discuss the story with fiction editor Deborah Treisman at The New Yorker for free.

Plot Summary

"The Lottery" takes place on June 27, a beautiful summer day, in a small New England village where all the residents gather for their traditional annual lottery. Though the event appears festive, it soon becomes clear that no one wants to win the lottery. Tessie Hutchinson seems unconcerned about the tradition until her family draws the dreaded mark. Then she protests that the process wasn't fair. The winner, it turns out, will be stoned to death by the remaining residents. Tessie wins, and the story closes as the villagers—including her own family members—begin to throw rocks at her.

Dissonant Contrasts

The story achieves its terrifying effect primarily through Jackson's skillful use of contrasts , through which she keeps the reader's expectations at odds with the story's action.

The picturesque setting contrasts sharply with the horrific violence of the conclusion. The story takes place on a beautiful summer day with flowers "blossoming profusely" and the grass "richly green." When the boys begin gathering stones, it seems like typical, playful behavior, and readers might imagine that everyone has gathered for something pleasant like a picnic or a parade.

Just as fine weather and family gatherings might lead us to expect something positive, so, too, does the word "lottery," which usually implies something good for the winner. Learning what the "winner" really gets is all the more horrifying because we have expected the opposite.

Like the peaceful setting, the villagers' casual attitude as they make small talk—some even cracking jokes—belies the violence to come. The narrator's perspective seems completely aligned with the villagers', so events are narrated in the same matter-of-fact, everyday manner the villagers use.

The narrator notes, for instance, that the town is small enough that the lottery can be "through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner." The men stand around talking of ordinary concerns like "planting and rain, tractors and taxes." The lottery, like "the square dances, the teenage club, the Halloween program," is just another of the "civic activities" conducted by Mr. Summers.

Readers may find that the addition of murder makes the lottery quite different from a square dance, but the villagers and the narrator evidently do not.

Hints of Unease

If the villagers were thoroughly numb to the violence—if Jackson had misled her readers entirely about where the story was heading—I don't think "The Lottery" would still be famous. But as the story progresses, Jackson gives escalating clues indicating something is amiss.

Before the lottery starts, the villagers keep "their distance" from the stool with the black box on it, and they hesitate when Mr. Summers asks for help. This is not necessarily the reaction you might expect from people looking forward to the lottery.

It also seems unexpected that the villagers talk as if drawing the tickets is difficult work that requires a man to do it. Mr. Summers asks Janey Dunbar, "Don't you have a grown boy to do it for you, Janey?" And everyone praises the Watson boy for drawing for his family. "Glad to see your mother's got a man to do it," says someone in the crowd.

The lottery itself is tense. People do not look around at each other. Mr. Summers and the men drawing slips of paper grin "at one another nervously and humorously."

On first reading, these details might strike the reader as odd, but they can be explained in several ways — for instance, people are nervous because they want to win. Yet when Tessie Hutchinson cries, "It wasn't fair!" readers realize there has been an undercurrent of tension and violence in the story all along.

What Does "The Lottery" Mean?

As with many stories, "The Lottery" has many analyses. For instance, the story has been read as a comment on World War II or a Marxist critique of an entrenched social order . Many readers find Tessie Hutchinson to be a reference to Anne Hutchinson , who was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for religious reasons. (But it's worth noting that Tessie doesn't really protest the lottery on principle—she protests only her own death sentence.)

Regardless of which interpretation you favor, "The Lottery" is, at its core, a story about the human capacity for violence, especially when violence is couched in an appeal to tradition or social order.

Jackson's narrator says, "No one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box." But although the villagers like to imagine that they're preserving tradition, the truth is that they remember very few details and the box itself is not the original. Rumors swirl about songs and salutes, but no one knows how the tradition started or what the details should be.

The only thing that remains consistent is the violence, which gives some indication of the villagers' priorities (and perhaps all of humanity's). Jackson writes, "Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones."

One of the starkest moments in the story is when the narrator bluntly states, "A stone hit her on the side of the head." From a grammatical standpoint, the sentence is structured so that no one actually threw the stone—it's as if the stone hit Tessie of its own accord. All the villagers participate (even giving Tessie's young son some pebbles to throw), so no one individually takes responsibility for the murder. And that, to me, is Jackson's most compelling explanation of why this barbaric tradition continues.

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Literary Analysis: “The Lottery”, Essay Example

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Shirley Jackson’s story, “The Lottery” (1948) is famous for disturbing readers. One of the reasons that the story incites such a powerful emotional response in the audience is that Jackon’s theme in the story relates to a central experience of being human. This experience is that of being both an individual and a member of collective society. By creating a “normal” world and setting that is also terrifying and horribly evil, Jackson is able to craft an unforgettable modern “fable” that carries a strong and highly significant message. Jackson uses irony throughout the story to convey the message that social conformity taken to an extreme is a most dangerous threat to humanity.

While many readers will readily see that Jackson has combined elements of modern life with primitive ideas and practices, such stoning, fewer readers are probably aware of the way in which irony is employed by Jackson to suggest the deeper conflict between individualism and conformity. For example, Tessie Hutchinson, who becomes the sacrificial victim of the stoning pleads for justice from the townspeople. In other words, she attempts to appeal to their sense of justice and humanity. Instead of responding, the townspeople stone Tessie Hutchinson to death because they have substituted blind obedience to ritual and law for a sense of justice and empathy. this is ironic in that, the townspeople are trying to follow law and custom to preserve their culture and ideals, but they are actually preventing true law and meaningful culture from happening.

The way that this sense of irony connects to the main theme of the story is that it shows how blind obedience to the crowd is often a path to injustice and tragedy. Therefore, it is important for individualism to exist as a counterbalance for social influences. Another way that Jackson uses irony to extend her theme of individuality is by connecting a superstitious ritual to a seemingly modern society. This is done by Jackson to make sure that the reader knows there is no rational reason for the lottery or the stoning of the town’s victims. They are simply following a custom for its own end and they are doing so while being obviously ignorant even of the origin or purpose of their murderous ritual. There is also a subtle implication of irony in the way that Jackson describes the weather and season: ‘flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green” (Jackson). Careful readers will note that the combination of murder and the beautiful day is meant to show that the people of the town are oblivious to nature.

Being oblivious or out of step with nature is a theme that aligns very closely to Jackson’s theme of social conformity. The usual vision of social conformity holds that it is an instinctual, evolutionary behavior for human-beings to group together in societies and follow a “herd” impulse. This vision is generally supported by comparing human nature to animal nature. Jackson turns this around ironically and implies that nature actually excels through individuality and birth, rather than conformity and death. The description of the season and weather is a form of symbolism to express this irony with the spring weather indicating birth and the sunny day symbolizing optimism and affirmation. The symbolic connection is offered almost obviously by Jackson in order to show, by contrast, how shallow and blind the people of the village have actually become.

Not a single person in the village is able to object to the ritual murder of the young girl. This is due not to actual powerlessness on the behalf of the people; it is due plainly to their ignorance and blind obedience to conformity. The people portrayed in the story are so afraid of being killed for “standing out” of the crowd that they each suppress their individuality. When each person suppresses their individual feelings all chance of political objection or rebellion dies. When this happens broken social systems, even ones which are cruel and dehumanizing, are able to continue despite the fact that their continuation provides nothing of merit to society.

In fact, this latter quality: the inability to question tradition of the status-quo is the most ironic construction in the story. By showing that the people in the village have simultaneously forgotten how or why the lottery started in the first place yet defend its ritual as the most significant thing in society, Jackson reaches her highest level of irony in the story. This shows that law is only important to conformists in itself; it does not need to serve any justice or social purpose. Of course, since the whole point of human society is ostensibly to rise out of the meaningless “primitive” state of nature, such blind conformity indicates that society has utterly failed. of course, this irony is even more brutal and more profoundly pronounced in that it results in the collective murder of an innocent child.

It is of utmost importance that readers understand Jackson’s story as being more than a story about primitive superstition. The fact, the story is a warning about the extreme dangers that accompany social conformity. While those who relish the idea of social order and law may fail to see the brilliance of Jackson’s argument, those who have suffered under the pressure of others to conform, blindly, to a belief, agenda, or organization will intuitively understand why it was necessary for Jackson to end her story with the brutal murder of an innocent girl. It was necessary because the danger of blind conformity is that it destroys everything important and meaningful about being human, and sacrifices it to a senseless obedience to tradition and law.

Works Cited

Jackson, Shirley. The Lottery. Classic Shorts.Com; accessed, 9-19-13. http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/lotry.html

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The Lottery

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Analysis: “The Lottery”

“The Lottery,” a short story by Shirley Jackson published in 1948, caused a sensation with its tale of a pleasant American town where, each summer, one citizen is chosen by random lottery and stoned to death. The story presents an extreme case of conventional thinking and mindless group action untethered by reason or compassion. When it published the story, The New Yorker magazine received a firestorm of criticism, hate mail, and cancelled subscriptions. Today, however, “The Lottery” is widely considered a classic of horror fiction.

Though her career was cut short at age 48, author Shirley Jackson was prolific, writing hundreds of short stories and several novels, most of them in the mystery and horror genres. Her most famous creations are the controversial short story The Lottery and the gothic horror novel The Haunting of Hill House ); both are regarded as superlative examples of horror fiction, and both have been adapted for stage and screen.

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“The Lottery”: Plot, Main Idea, and Writing Style Essay

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“The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson, focuses on traditions throughout the story. The story’s overarching subject is conveyed through the employment of fiction elements such as setting, verisimilitude, and point of view. The writing is persuasive and compels the reader to go over it again and again. The narrative tries to educate readers that all customs, regardless of whether they are included, are not always righteous.

The third person tells the story to offer the viewer the finest comprehension. The storyteller was not a resident of the community who had to go through the Lottery’s rites. Obviously, the story was given from an omniscient perspective because the speaker was well-informed about everyone “…Old Man Warner, the oldest man in town….” (Shirley, 2014, p. 137). The listener gains a clear picture of the locals and their strange traditions by providing this perspective throughout the play. If the narrative were presented from the perspective of one of the villagers, it would appear to be more biased and less detailed than it is. This point of view explains the Lottery’s tradition in great detail, including how the Lottery should be prepared and the rituals involved.

The backdrop and characters depict average, everyday people gathered in the town square for an event. At the beginning of the story, there is nothing extraordinary about this day or the happenings of the day. A toddler playing with stones is not unusual, yet it may raise questions in the minds of the readers about the nature of this Lottery. The audience gets a strong sense that something horrible is going to happen as the story progresses with the Lottery’s background, setup, and name-calling. The truth does not sink in until all of the men glance at their pieces of paper, and Tessie Hutchinson begins frantically shrieking. The sorrow and desperation allow the readers to empathize with Tessie and imagine themselves in her situation. This is why, while Tessie’s family members are stoning her to death, the audience may get disgusted with the townsfolk and the story’s whole theme. The truth is that no one wants to be connected with a species that is willing to kill a friend or family member every year just because tradition dictates it.

In order to offer the reader a better comprehension of the story, the environment is described in great detail. The quote “The morning of June 27th…” informs the audience of the Lottery’s time and date (Shirley, 2014, p. 136). The time range for the Lottery is also revealed in the story. The narrative also provides the Lottery’s time frame: “…so it may start at ten o’clock in the morning… allow the locals to return home in time for lunch” (Shirley, 2014, p. 137). It illustrates the day to be a beautiful and pleasant day, giving the readers the idea of a peaceful setting. With the information about the setting earlier on, it is almost as if the speaker wanted the audience to assume this was going to be a peaceful story with a happy conclusion. The events of the day are as familiar to the residents of this town as any other: “The lottery was held – as were the square dances, the teenage club, and the Halloween program…”

The reasonableness of the events in this story demonstrates how this irrational custom has conditioned the villagers. Traditions from any group of people or religion can appear odd or illogical to others who are unfamiliar with them, but just because something is different from how one group does things does not imply it is wrong. Shirley Jackson’s goal with this narrative may have been to test what kind of reaction it would get from the general public. The purpose of the story is not how an entire village stoned one person to death but how one custom binds the community together and keeps them connected to the only thing they know: their past. The reader can choose whether or not tradition is a positive or bad subject. The power to choose the true meaning of the story is what actually distinguishes it.

Shirley, J. (2014). The Lottery. In E. V. Roberts & R. Zweig (Eds.), Literature: An introduction to reading and writing, compact edition (6 th ed.). (136-137). Pearson College Division.

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IvyPanda. (2022, December 16). “The Lottery”: Plot, Main Idea, and Writing Style. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-lottery-plot-main-idea-and-writing-style/

"“The Lottery”: Plot, Main Idea, and Writing Style." IvyPanda , 16 Dec. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/the-lottery-plot-main-idea-and-writing-style/.

IvyPanda . (2022) '“The Lottery”: Plot, Main Idea, and Writing Style'. 16 December.

IvyPanda . 2022. "“The Lottery”: Plot, Main Idea, and Writing Style." December 16, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-lottery-plot-main-idea-and-writing-style/.

1. IvyPanda . "“The Lottery”: Plot, Main Idea, and Writing Style." December 16, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-lottery-plot-main-idea-and-writing-style/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "“The Lottery”: Plot, Main Idea, and Writing Style." December 16, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-lottery-plot-main-idea-and-writing-style/.

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Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery": a Rhetorical Analysis

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