The Lottery Satire

Figurative language is a strategy that authors have used over the years to give the reader different perspectives on the piece that they are reading about. In her short Story, “The Lottery”, Shirley Jackson writes about a small town that has a tradition known as the lottery. The way that the lottery works, is that there is black box with pieces of paper in it. The pieces of paper have the family names of every family in town. The last name standing then has to go into an elimination round with the people within the family. Each family member draws out of the black box, and the family member that pulls the slip of paper with the black dot gets stoned to death. In her short story, Jackson utilizes symbolism in the form of Old Man Warren, the black box and the pile of stones to demonstrate how tradition can be blinding without even knowing it.

1. Social psychologists observe that every group develops its own outcast or misfit, who is blamed for all sorts of group malfunctions and woes. Have you observed this dynamic in your own work, school, church, or family groups?

The use of Satire/Irony within literature establishes situations where the unlikelihood of the occurrence of an event will happen. Jackson’s manipulation of his story, The Lottery, provides an unexpected twist to what one may seem to be a normal subject. Northrop Frye’s The Singing School, suggests that all stories are told in either one of four ways: Comedy, Romance, Tragedy or Satire/Irony (Frye 18). The use of Irony and its conventional associations eludes the reader from interpreting a story as a Romance, but instead give the reader a reversed twist. This use of ironic convention in literary work is seen through Shirley Jackson’s short story, The Lottery; the story of Tessie

Dystopian stories works depict a negative view of "the way the world is supposedly going in order to provide urgent propaganda for a change in direction”. Often these stories have many themes that can relate to the real world. In the dystopian story “The Lottery” written by Shirley Jackson, many themes such as false hopes,hypocrisy, ritual, and mob mentality are expressed throughout the story. In the story everyone in a small village gather in the town square for the lottery, whoever gets chosen gets stoned to death by everyone in the town including friends and loved ones. The use of different themes throughout the story relate to the literary devices and universal storytelling elements setting, verbal irony, symbolism, and social cohesion.

Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" portrays a small town in which the villagers gather for a yearly lottery. Unlike any normal lottery you wouldn’t want to win this prize. In Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” the author creates a story packed with Irony, Symbolism, and Dark tone, compacted with a ritualized tradition that makes evil, ultimately signifying how people blindly follow tradition.

When you think of the lottery, you think of positivity. Many people dream of hitting the lottery. To a man, the lottery is the best thing that could ever happen. However, in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” the ‘lottery’ is far from being the best. What catches my eye the most was the overall theme and the amount of irony throughout the entire piece.

Shirley Jackson is known for her creative writing and plot twisting stories such as “The Possibility of Evil” and “The Lottery”. Jackson always finds a way to leave the reader somewhat confused and wanting to read more. In both of these stories it is a small town where everyone knows one another but something about each of these towns isn't right. In “The Lottery” it turns out that each year, one family, then individual from that family is chosen to be stoned to death for a sacrifice. Then in “The Possibility of Evil” it turns out that one old woman has been writing rude anonymous letters to the people of the town. In both essays Jackson uses many literary devices that help her create these stories that she is so known for. Some of the literary devices she uses are situational and verbal irony, and mood and foreshadowing. She uses a fair amount of all three of these throughout her short stories.

In this essay I will be doing a compare and contrast between the two stories “The Lottery” by Chris Alani and “the Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. Both stories were good, and had a deep meaning behind both stories that leaves the readers wondering why the stories had to end in the way they did. Now I’ll start off by giving a summary of both stories so you can know and understand my point of view better.

Over the years many critics have wrote articles on Shirley Jackson's numerous works. Many critics had much to say about Jackson's most famous short story, "The Lottery". Her insights and observations about man and society are disturbing; and in the case of "The Lottery," they are shocking. "The themes themselves are not new, evil cloaked in seeming good, prejudice and hypocrisy, loneliness and frustration, psychological studies of minds that have slipped the bonds of reality" (Friedman). Literary critic, Elizabeth Janeway wrote that, " 'The Lottery' makes its effect without having to state a moral about humanity's need to deflect the knowledge of its own death on a victim. That uneasy consciousness is

In “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson and the historical event of blacklisting Americans during the 1950s, the authors convey that loyalty causes us to turn against others around you through symbols. In “The Lottery”, loyalty to tradition caused a society to turn on one another. “The Lottery” was an annual tradition where each head of household (the dominant male in each home) picked a slip of paper. If the piece selected had a black dot on it, you had to go through the selection process again, but this time each individual member of your family had to choose a slip out of the box. Whoever chose the black dot out of there family had won the Lottery, and would be sacrificed for a good corn season. On the seventy-seventh lottery, the

With great wealth comes great responsibility. Most people claim that immense fortune won’t change them, and they can get away with saying this because so few can come into a position where that stance is challenged. Satire is a literary technique of writing which ridicules its subject often as an intended means of provoking or preventing change. Through the use of low comedy and irony, Family Guy satirizes the lottery and attacks the uneducated wealthy in the episode “Lottery Fever”. "Lottery Fever" is the first episode of the tenth season of the animated television series Family Guy. The episode follows the Griffin family after they win the state lottery, and go on to spend the money with no regard. After continually wasting the money on various expenditures, the family discovers that they have gone broke, and return to their quotidian lifestyle as a lower middle class family.

There are many Americans and people all over the world that live their lives following traditions that are passed down from one generation to another. A tradition can be as simple as cooking a recipe to how you raise your children and holiday traditions. Culture plays a significant role in how people live their day to day lives. In Shirley Jacksons “The Lottery” the people that lived in the town follow a tradition every year. It's easy to understand why Shirley Jackson’s Lottery caused controversy when it was published shortly after World War II in 1948. The Lottery has been dramatized, televised and turned into a ballet. It is taught in high schools and colleges. (Whittier). The Lottery held many questions about traditions that have

In both The Lottery, and The Possibility of Evil there is a very evident theme that is horror lies in the most everyday settings and situations. This is shown in The Lottery by the “lottery” being considered an everyday normal aspect of life.We know that the “lottery” is the act of a name being drawn from a box, and the person who is drawn is going to be stoned to death, with frankly no reason at all. Also in The Lottery, no one is emotionally phased to the cruelty shown in the town, and throughout the story, as if it is apart of their everyday life. In The Possibility of Evil, we see this theme during the whole story, considering the main idea of the story is a woman who is trying to stop all of the evil in her and her towns everyday

In “The Lottery” we can tell that the winner faces a grim fate before it actually happens in the story. For example, at the beginning of the story we see children taking care to gather stones and pile them in the corner of town square where the lottery takes place. When Bobby Martin (a young school child from the village) and his friends, Bobby, and Harry Jones, and Dickie Delacroix head to town to town square the text says, “Bobby Martin stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest, roundest stones...eventually making a great pile of stones in the corner of the square” (Jackson). The young boys are gathering stones to place in the town square. Bobby and his young colleagues do this

The lottery is actually one of my favorite short stories. I read it when I was in junior high and I've seen a few short movies on the lottery as well and although there are more questions than answers, I believe that there are multiple meanings to the lottery. My first thought is it's a story about conformity and how sometimes we do things in society that are not right but because everyone else is doing them or because it's tradition we continue to do things even though we know they are morally or ethically wrong. I'll take for example something like discrimination and segregation in the United States Jim Crow laws were totally acceptable and they were even encouraged and mandated in many parts of United States and a lot of people went along because they didn't know any better and it was tradition and it was what their mother did and their father did and the grandparents did and how they treated other people who are different from them so they just assume that this is just the way that things have to be when it comes to traditions they can be