The Lottery
"The Lottery" is a 1948 short story written by Shirley Jackson.
It's June 27th in a small American village. A village of three hundred people has prepared for this day as if it were another celebration, like a square dance or a Halloween program. This event, The Lottery, consists of pulling a townsperson's name, one by one, out of a splintery black box.
It would be any other quaint story if it weren't for the heavy symbolism. The story is Shirley Jackson's views on the pointlessness of violence and the inhumanity in the world, in each and every person and their own neighbors. Shirley Jackson received much hate mail for it, readers unsubscribed, and the story was banned in the Union of South Africa (the precursor to modern-day South Africa). Today it is an often used School Study Medium.
It is probably best known as a staple of American Junior high/Middle School literature classes. It has been adapted into many kinds of media, such as radio, one-act plays, short films, a 1969 ballet, and a successful 1996 Made for TV Movie. Shout Outs in other media are not uncommon, such as The Simpsons and South Park.
The full story can be read here.
Tropes featured in the short story:
- Asshole Victim: Tessie Hutchinson
- A Fete Worse Than Death
- Foreshadowing: The boys stacking stones in the beginning.
- More than just them. On second reading, it's remarkable how many times stones are mentioned.
- Grumpy Old Man: Old Man Warner
- Human Sacrifice: Tessie is sacrificed to make the corn harvest plentiful.
- There is hope, though. Mention is made of towns stopping the custom.
- Infant Immortality: Subverted. In-story, it's played straight, but when someone draws the spotted paper, everyone in their family must draw again to see which one of them will die--even the toddler.
- Lottery of Doom
- Nobody Ever Complained Before: The lottery continues to exist because no one questioned it until now.
- Peer Pressure Makes You Evil: Babies smiling as they pick up pebbles to throw...
- Regularly Scheduled Evil: June 27th of every year.
- Rule of Symbolism: Here's a comprehensive list of what each element means... supposedly.
- Rule of Three: The three-legged chair can be interpreted as anything. ANYTHING.
- School Study Media: Guaranteed to be the one short story in class that you actually remember reading.
- Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: On the cynical side.
- Stepford Suburbia
- Tomato Surprise
- TV Never Lies: Many readers wrote to the author to express their disgust at the fact that this sort of thing was happening in the modern world. Yes, it's Fiction, in the strongest sense of the word.
- Uncanny Village