ST

21 CENTURY
LITERATURE FROM THE
PHILIPPINES AND THE
WORLD

Submitted by: Angel M. Panon

HUMSS 11- MARTIN DE PORRES

Submitted to: Ms. Elora Mae T. Costan

21st CENTURY TEACHER

“Luck is not as random as you

think. Before that lottery ticket
won the jackpot, someone had
to buy it.” - Vera Nazarian
Angel M. Panon

Output #4 – Marxist Literary Critic Paper Writing

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson is one of the most recognized short pieces of literature in
the US. First published in 1948, it quickly gained popularity due to various psychological
aspects of the story. The following analysis of The Lottery is going to talk about it in
detail. When Shirley Jackson's chilling story "The Lottery”, it generated more letters
than any work of fiction the magazine had ever published. Readers were furious,
disgusted, occasionally curious, and almost uniformly bewildered.
The public outcry over the story can be attributed, in part, 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 American culture. It has been adapted for radio, theater,
television, and even ballet.
“The Lottery” is a very twisted story, where there is a tradition of a lottery that decides
which town member will be stoned to death that year. In the short story “The Lottery”,
Jackson uses the black box, Old Man Warner, and Tessie Hutchinson as symbols to show
that humans will blindly follow meaningless traditions.
"The Lottery" takes place on June 27, a beautiful summer day, in a small New England
village where all the residents are gathering for their traditional annual lottery. Though
the event first 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.
The black box is the box that the names are picked out of for the lottery every time the
lottery takes place. It represents the tradition of the lottery and the illogical
sentimentality of the villager’s loyalty to it. The black box was mentioned several times
in the story in detail and people did not want to get a new box even though it was
shabby and worn out.
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 action
of the story. 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.
As with many stories, there have been countless interpretations of "The Lottery." For
instance, the story has been read as a comment on World War II or as 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 that violence is couched in an appeal
to tradition or social order.

Jackson's narrator tells us that "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 seems to know
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 manages to
continue.

The unfolding of the short story reflects how humans mistreat each other. Presumably,
it happens in compliance with cultural beliefs and practices. The lottery act undermines
human nature. So, the individuals seem to condone such evils with less consideration
for their negative impacts.

At the end of the story, the “light of hope” for liberalization represented by Mrs.
Hutchinson dies. That proves the existence of a corrupt and evil nature of man.
Generally speaking, the short story describes the social malpractices that society
conducts to each other as if they were ordinary occurrences.

Thinking this on the level of society, all of us are in the pool. And every death penalty or
lifelong sentence is a tribute to a homogeneous society, where stable living-conditions
of the majority rule over the freedom and lives of a few ‚misfits. Nowadays the people,
communities and countries who share and define these values of the majority benefit
from the death penalties just as the villagers hope to improve next year’s harvest.

Male and female, child and adult, individual and communal: all these dichotomies
express Shirley Jackson's theme of a hidden reality beneath the surface of our everyday
lives. The subtle way she manages to infiltrate and entertain us within one story makes
it a masterpiece to me. Her use of irony in this story was so effective that the
publication of „The Lottery" by The New Yorker in 1948 provoked the mentioned
unprecedented torrent of mail partially from readers believing that the ritual described
in the story was factual and demanding to know where it was practiced.