analysis essay on the lottery by shirley jackson

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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The Lottery by Shirley Jackson – Summary, Themes, and Analysis

August 31, 2023

Shirley Jackson is best remembered for her sharply critical, feminist deflation of broadly accepted norms of mid-twentieth-century American life. It is a great irony that her most incendiary of works, “The Lottery,” is now a widely taught classic. When Jackson’s short story was published in The New Yorker in late June of 1948, both the author and magazine were subjected to a firestorm of hate mail from readers. The story made Jackson famous, or infamous, almost overnight. Its early reception is perhaps one key to the story’s enduring appeal for contemporary readers. Why did Jackson strike such a nerve in 1948? You can hear the story read by the actress Elisabeth Moss , who notably played Jackson in a recent biopic. But if you want to understand what made the story a firebrand of controversy, this article postulates some theories after our The Lottery by Shirley Jackson summary.

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson Summary

Jackson’s story takes place within a single day, June 27th, of an unspecified year. The first sentences establish the bucolic, small-town setting in which the action will unfold. During this day, villagers will amass in the town square for the yearly lottery, which lasts for about two hours. Jackson’s narrator compares this with other, similarly unnamed larger towns where the ritual takes longer. Children recently on summer break are the first to assemble. Three male children, named Bobby Martin, Harry Jones, and Dickie Delacroix, make a game of aggregating and sorting stones. Soon adult men, followed by women, begin to gather. They exhibit the stereotypical normalcy of small-town life, warmly gossiping and discussing work.

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson Summary—Part Two

As more gather, they begin to sort themselves into discrete nuclear families. Then Mr. Summers, the organizer and master of ceremonies for this town’s lottery, is introduced. It is suggested that he occupies his role because of his lack of children. He carries a black wooden box, which he places on a three-legged stool in the center of the square. Reflecting on this box, the narrator describes its age and the even older “original [lottery] paraphernalia” that has been lost. Despite this, the villagers respect the sense of tradition conferred on the black box. Some even tell stories that the box is made up of pieces of the older box. Although the symbols and process of the lottery have gradually changed, there is still a concerted effort by all involved to connect it to the ritual’s origins.

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson Summary—Part Three

Mr. Summers filled the box with slips of paper the previous day and kept it locked in a safe overnight. His duties also involve confirming the attendance of each family and family member. While Mr. Summers prepares for the lottery, Tessie Hutchinson shows up breathless and late, having forgotten the important date. She good-humoredly greets her husband, Bill, who playfully chides her lateness. After Tessie’s arrival, Mr. Summers expresses his impatience to begin. A man named Dunbar is discovered to be absent due to a broken leg. It is ascertained that his wife will draw in the lottery in his place, because Dunbar’s son is under the age of sixteen. However, another teenage boy in the Watson family declares he is old enough to draw for his father.

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson Summary—Part Four

Following a hush in the crowd, Mr. Summers begins the lottery. As Mr. Summers reads names, the heads of families approach the box and extract a piece of paper. The men, Mrs. Dunbar, and young Jack Watson select paper slips. They each avoid looking at the slips and hold onto them nervously. While this process unfolds, the villagers gossip about other towns abandoning the lottery ritual. Old Man Warner, the oldest villager, scoffs at this and derides young people. He asserts the necessity of the lottery for a productive, harmonious society and a plentiful harvest. When his name is called, Old Man Warner announces that it is his seventy-seventh year taking part in the lottery.

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson Summary—Part Five

After all the heads of families draw papers, they simultaneously open them to read the results. It is revealed that the Hutchinson family has been selected in this year’s lottery. Bill Hutchison seems stoic in the face of the news, but his late-arriving wife Tessie immediately panics. She argues with Mr. Summers, saying he rushed her husband’s paper selection. Bill and the other villagers chide her for her response and caution her to be a good sport. Then, Mr. Summers prepares for the next phase of the lottery process. Five slips of paper are selected in put in the box, representing Bill, Tessie, and three of their children. The others are scattered on the ground.

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson Summary—Part Six

Tessie continues to protest, saying that her other daughter and son-in-law should be included. Mr. Summers rebuffs this argument, explaining that daughters draw with their husbands’ families. Demoralized, Tessie fumes to herself about the unfairness of the lottery. Next, the five Hutchinsons—Bill, Tessie, Bill, Jr., Nancy, and little Dave—select from the five available slips. Amid the mounting dread of the narrative, there is a horrifying description of the Hutchinson toddler being helped to draw. A girl in the crowd whispers her hope that her twelve-year-old friend, Nancy Hutchinson, will be spared. Old Man Warner expresses disappointment that the atmosphere is different than it used to be. We can infer from his earlier characterization that he expects a more respectful, enthusiastic response.

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson Summary—Ending

After each of the family members has selected, Mr. Summers tells them to open their slips. A general sigh is let out when little Dave’s paper is revealed to be blank. Nancy and Bill, Jr. also have blank papers. Finally, Bill opens his paper and reveals that it is also blank. Mr. Hutchinson forces the mute Tessie to reveal her slip, which bears a black spot. In a cruel twist of irony, Tessie is the “winner” of the lottery. Everyone quickly prepares for the end of the ritual. Jackson’s narrator remarks that, although many aspects of the ritual have been forgotten, the use of stones has been endlessly preserved.

Villagers select from the pile of stones prepared earlier by the children. Mrs. Delacroix, who has been friendly with Tessie throughout the story, selects a stone so large it requires both hands. Even little Dave Hutchinson is supplied with a few pebbles, suggesting the necessity of universal participation. With Tessie now in the middle of the square, the villagers begin to hurl the stones at her. She desperately begs them to stop, continuing to protest that the lottery was not fair. But the story ends with the villagers converging on Tessie and presumably killing her.

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson Theme: Group Psychology

An immediately remarkable aspect of “The Lottery” is the relative anonymity of its setting and characters. We never learn the name of the town or even its location. Some of the characters are given names and brief sketches of their backgrounds and interiorities. But for the most part, the emphasis is on an undifferentiated small-town community. And the only thing we really know about this community is its potential for sudden aggression and violence. From this, it seems clear that Jackson is interested in using fiction to explore the group psychology of mob violence.

Earlier in the century, psychologists Gustave Le Bon and Sigmund Freud were developing influential theories of the group mind. As with contemporary accounts of mob mentality in the field of social psychology, Le Bon and Freud were interested in theorizing how people in crowds lose their sense of identity and carry out actions that would be deemed unacceptable when committed by individuals alone. These theories would take on new significance in the post-War era, with the collective violence of Nazism in the rearview.

In “The Lottery,” the anonymity of the setting and characters contributes to the sense that it is a psychological test case. There is even the suggestion that everyone, even Little Dave, must participate in the violence to make it acceptable. Jackson’s interest in psychology is palpable across her oeuvre, particularly in her masterful The Haunting of Hill House . With “The Lottery,” she expertly made use of the constraints of the short story structure to provide as little information as possible, which greatly contributes to the story’s examination of groupthink.

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson Theme: Invented Traditions and Mythic Thinking

In the short story, a good deal of space is devoted to the specific histories and rituals of the lottery. We learn how the ritual has altered in the years since its inception. But the townsfolk also make a concerted effort to maintain a link with tradition through the lottery. This dynamic between novelty and tradition provides Jackson an opportunity to explore the theme of invented traditions. The historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger coined the term “invented tradition” in the 1980s. They describe how most traditions we think of as ancient in origin are usually invented more recently. People use symbols and myths to confer the idea of tradition on newer practices and rituals.  For instance, the villagers imagine that Mr. Summer’s black box is made from pieces of an even older box. This allows them to imagine that time-bound practices are more timeless.

Hobsbawm and Ranger argue that invented traditions are most apparent in the mythic thinking of nationalism. Though nations are relatively modern inventions, we use national symbols and myths to make them seem ancient. Similarly, the lottery helps cohere the community through a shared sense of earlier roots. The townsfolk are ready to sacrifice themselves in the lottery in the same way that citizens are valorized for sacrificing their lives for the nation. Through the invented tradition of the lottery, Jackson explores the way mythic thinking confers arbitrary events with moral significance. Although her characters alter the tradition to suit their whims, its link to vaguely defined origins ensures its continued value.

The Lottery Analysis: Patriarchal Violence, Romantic Nationalism, and Conformity in Post-War America

Jackson’s exploration of group psychology and invented traditions like nationalism has obvious historical significance. The story came immediately after World War II, when mob mentality and romantic nationalism plunged the globe into total war. The authoritarianism of Nazi Germany was bolstered by a sense of a shared tradition, where true citizens were mythically bound together by blood and connection to the land. Thus, Jackson’s story provocatively uses its bucolic, communitarian setting to explore dark, ultra-nationalist thought.

Why then was Jackson’s story so controversial for the American reading public? Alongside its rather off-putting cruelty, the story suggests fundamental parallels between aspects of democratic American culture and more authoritarian societies. It does this by eviscerating the legitimacy of any kind of nationalist culture. The titular lottery offers a microcosmic example of the human cost of invented national traditions. While many believed the loss of American lives in World War II was for a good cause, Jackson’s story suggests the deluded thinking that contributes to this self-sacrificial attitude. The real power of “The Lottery” comes from its refusal of specificity in setting. Through this, Jackson suggests that fascistic attitudes were more universalized than her audience liked to imagine.

The Lottery Analysis—Continued

“The Lottery” also draws attention to the role scapegoats play within communities. Societies, especially those organized around a sense of shared tradition, often persecute others to mark their limits. It seems to be no accident that the ultimate scapegoat of the lottery is a woman. We can glean from the story that this is a patriarchal culture, with families organized around adult men. Here again, Jackson draws disconcerting parallels between the masculinist, authoritarian culture of Nazi Germany and patriarchal U.S. culture. In both cases, women, along with ethnic and religious minorities, were oppressed to valorize male- and ethnocentric nations.

As a feminist text, “The Lottery” seems to stand out from earlier examples that draw attention to the plight of women while endorsing nationalist or racist attitudes. In this way, you might compare it to another famous short story: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. In contrast to Gilman’s eugenicist views, the picture of Jackson we get from “The Lottery” is antagonistic to the host of ways masculinist society creates others to maintain legitimacy.

The Lottery Summary & Analysis—Conclusion

For an American culture high off its victory in the recent World War, Jackson’s story undeniably sounded a sour note. Against the prevailing self-congratulatory attitude, it sounded an alarm about the continued threat of nationalist mob mentality. And her readers should have listened. Two years after the story was published, McCarthyism reached a fever pitch in the U.S. Suspicion over who was sufficiently national, and who could be sacrificed to ensure the success of the nation, abounded. The cultural politics of the following decade became defined by a tendency toward conformity and hostility to difference. But arguably, we have continued to grapple as a society with these kinds of problems ever since.

Whether we locate ourselves in the post-9/11 era or in the recent resurgence of far-right nationalism, Jackson’s story unfortunately still resonates. It remains an endless curiosity for how it captured a late-40s zeitgeist, and an ominous warning of violence to come.

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“The Lottery” Essay: Summary & Analysis

This “The Lottery” essay will focus on the analysis of the main plot wrists and themes of the short story written by Shirley Jackson in 1948. This story quickly became popular because of the psychological themes wrapped in a bizarre narrative so readers have a lot of room for analysis.

Introduction

The story revolves around an annual lottery. This isn’t a regular lottery but rather a gruesome event which implies that friends and family members should randomly select someone in the village and stone them to death. Such a lottery has been a tradition for many years and it was initially aimed to ensure a good harvest.

When the story takes place, nobody remembers why such a tradition exists but nobody questions it. The author shows that such a tradition is perceived by people as something absolutely normal.

People are excited about the lottery, they prepare tickets and are ready to kill whoever turns out to be the least lucky person in the village. In this short story, Jackson shows what people are capable of when terrible things are justified by traditions. Nobody questions local customs in this remote American village, and its inhabitants are not concerned about the atrocities that happen there.

“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson: Summary

“The Lottery” depicts a few moments from the life of a remote village in America. Mr. Graves and Mr. Summers prepare lottery tickets. All but one of them are empty, and one ticket has a black dot. These tickets are placed in a large box, and Mr. Summers keeps this box in his office.

During the celebration, all families grab tickets from the box, and then open these folded tickets simultaneously. Bill Hutchinson opens a ticket with the mark. His wife is shocked and she starts protesting, but others ignore her.

Once the first stage of the lottery is completed, members of the chosen family draw tickets to choose who will die. Every member of the family should participate, and even the youngest children, who are not old enough to understand what happens, should draw their tickets.

Mrs. Hutchinson, who protested against her family being chosen for the annual lottery, draws the unlucky ticket this time, and all the participants immediately start to pick their rocks, even her little son. The elders of the village encourage everyone to respect the tradition while Mrs. Hutchinson is being stoned to death by her neighbors and family members.

“The Lottery”: Literary Analysis

Jackson mostly uses characters’ actions to describe them. Although we only see the characters through a few actions, these actions have significant consequences or clearly define the characters. For instance, we can see that Mrs. Delacroix is quick-tempered. She picks the biggest rock she can find, and she’s even frustrated by the fact that she needs to hold this rock with two hands (Shirley 76).

The plot of this story shows us that the author strongly disagrees with the savage nature of humankind and its hypocrisy. She describes people who treat each other “without a flinch of sympathy” (Shirley 281). The idea of an annual lottery suggests that someone should benefit from it, but this doesn’t happen. These people simply murder somebody because other people did that before, and they gain nothing from it.

Jackson illustrates human evilness by writing about horrible things in an ordinary way. None of the characters see what they do as something evil, and the whole preparation for the lottery happens in a relaxed and friendly setting.

The whole story is presented in such a way that we don’t even feel how terrible this annual celebration is until the very end. Mr. Summers, who takes care of the tickets and is in charge of the lottery, is respected by other members of the community. He coordinates various activities and organizes events.

Mr. Summers is depicted as a leader with a modest personality. While his hand is resting on the box with tickets, he looks “very proper and important” (Jackson 282). The whole procedure doesn’t raise any questions among the villagers, even though it violates basic human rights.

Jackson uses the names of her characters symbolically. For instance, the name Summers reminds us of the initial theme of the lottery which used to be a seasonal event (Marshall 3). Mr. Summers’ assistant, Mr. Graves also has a symbolic name that reminds us of the gruesome nature of this event.

The lottery simply portrays the wicked nature of humans. Such a tradition has existed in this area for many generations, and still, nobody questions it. No one is nervous about this terrible practice simply because it’s perceived as traditional and normal. Even Mrs. Hutchinson only starts to protest after her family is chosen (Hyman 46). Eventually, Mrs. Hutchinson is sacrificed right after expressing her disagreement.

Nobody is disgusted by the violation of people’s rights for life (Hyman 35), and the lack of morality makes people do horrible things. People’s brutality looks especially shocking because of how calm and relaxed these people are. Such a setting reflects people’s profound hypocrisy and wickedness (Marshall 3).

Mrs. Hutchinson is the only person who starts to protest against the tradition but we quickly realize that there’s no place for disagreements and doubt in this society. Jackson perfectly illustrates how people agree with any cultural norms they’re put in unless these norms start to hurt them personally. No matter how friendly these ordinary people look, their evil nature continues to thrive, and Mrs. Hutchinson is just another victim that will be soon forgotten by everyone.

“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson illustrates humans’ cruel nature and the way people mistreat each other as long as it doesn’t go against beliefs and cultural norms. This short story revolves around the topic of traditions that remain unquestioned by people, no matter how absurd and brutal they are.

Besides, the author focuses on the evilness of human nature. We see a ray of hope at the end when Mrs. Hutchinson becomes the one to question the tradition but she quickly dies. The overall calm setting illustrates how easily people get used to any social malpractices, no matter how brutal they are.

Hyman, Stanley. The Presentation of Evil in “The Lottery”. 2000, New Jersey: Bantam Publishing Co.

Jackson, Shirley. The Lottery. 1948, New York: McGraw-Hill Publishers.

Marshall, Garry. Analysis of “The Lottery” a Short Story by Shirley Jackson. 2003, New York: Lori Voth Publishers.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — The Lottery — Critical Analysis of a Short Story the Lottery by Shirley Jackson

Critical Analysis of a Short Story The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

• Categories: Shirley Jackson Short Story The Lottery

About this sample

Words: 1289 |

Published: Dec 3, 2020

Words: 1289 | Pages: 3 | 7 min read

This essay analyzes Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” a story critiquing blind adherence to tradition through suspense and horror. It discusses the use of irony and symbolism to highlight the dangers of societal conformity and the potential for violence within human nature. By providing a critical paper example with a balanced perspective, the analysis emphasizes the narrative’s relevance to historical and contemporary issues of unchecked cultural practices.

Works Cited

• Jackson, S. (1948). The Lottery. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1948/06/26/the-lottery
• Boudreau, K. (2015). Tradition and Tessie Hutchinson: Causes and Effects in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”. Academic Exchange Quarterly, 19(4), 1-7.
• Carroll, M. (1989). On Defending “The Lottery”. College English, 51(2), 156-161.
• Collopy, R. M. (2019). Tradition and Symbolism in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”. Journal of Language and Literature Education, 7(1), 42-55.
• Franklin, R. L. (2000). Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”: The Authorized Graphic Adaptation. Hill and Wang.
• Hattenhauer, D. (2005). Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”: A Critically Annotated Bibliography. Greenwood Press.
• Kelly, J. P. (1997). Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”: The Authorized Dramatization. Dramatic Publishing.
• Oehlschlaeger, F. (1975). “The Lottery”: Symbolic Tour de Force. American Literature, 46(1), 100-107.
• Parkinson, D. (2010). Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and the Possibility of Evil. Notes on Contemporary Literature, 40(3), 9-12.
• Van Alstyne, K. (2017). “I Remember That Day”: A Critical Companion to Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”. Routledge.

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“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson Essay (Critical Writing)

Introduction, works cited.

The Lottery i s a 1948 story written by Shirley Jackson. The story is about a small town in the United States that maintains a lottery tradition every year. One resident of this town is chosen randomly by drawing lots, and the rest throw stones at him (Jackson). The first publication of this work caused a broad resonance among readers. In this small work, several urgent and severe societal topics are raised at once – this is the search for a scapegoat, herd feeling, and blind adherence to traditions.

Among the town residents, there is an opinion that the person who “won” the lottery pays for all the evil that has accumulated over the year. The power of tradition and habit stands above the common sense of every inhabitant, except for the victim. Fatal consequences and the settlement of justice takes place with the help of a gambling drawing of lots. The author wanted to show that the strength of the crowd, coupled with a strong sense of habit and tradition, so much clouded the mind that only the victim, left alone against the entire crowd, can realize all the injustice and cruelty of such a tradition.

The work raises questions about how faithful to follow traditions in general and when they need to be revised. Of course, cruelty is brought to the absolute in this story, but the question remains relevant. The society in work is not taught by experience that one randomly taken person can pay for the crowd’s mistakes. The relief that residents feel when they stretch out an unmarked paper completely stops all thought in the direction of injustice. Perhaps a momentary fear of a moment when nothing is known yet would cause a revision of traditions (Nebeker, 101). However, society has gone so far that even the pain of the victim does not stop them.

The work touches on a vast number of topics that project society’s ills, elevated to hyperbole. The heavy and resonant acceptance of this story by readers only proves its literary power. An individual or society as a whole cannot be recouped by randomly drawing a scapegoat. The strength of the crowd must always be regulated by common sense, which is sometimes spoken by the mouth of the victim of the crowd.

Jackson, Shirley. The lottery . Harvard University Press, 2013.

Nebeker, Helen E. “‘The Lottery’: Symbolic Tour de Force.” American Literature 46.1 (1974): 100-108.

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IvyPanda. (2022, July 20). “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-lottery-by-shirley-jackson-critical-writing-examples/

"“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson." IvyPanda , 20 July 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/the-lottery-by-shirley-jackson-critical-writing-examples/.

IvyPanda . (2022) '“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson'. 20 July.

IvyPanda . 2022. "“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson." July 20, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-lottery-by-shirley-jackson-critical-writing-examples/.

1. IvyPanda . "“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson." July 20, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-lottery-by-shirley-jackson-critical-writing-examples/.

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