THE LOTTERY Brittany Rhodes Literature Presentation

BASIC OUTLINE OF PLOT

 Tessie Hutchinson  Mr. Summers  Old Man Warner  Town kids- Bobby Martian, Harry Jones, Dickie Dellacroy  Harry Graves  Mr. Martin and Son  Mrs. Delacroix  Dunbar- Clyde, Janey and Horace  Watson Boy  Rest of Hutchinson Family CHARACTERS Round Flat The characters are all static, they don’t change as the story progresses. Tessie is changed at the end of the story mainly because of the fact that she dies, but other than that, she doesn’t like the lottery through the story.

 Shirley Jackson uses a different approach to how she write. Through the whole story, you don’t know what the lottery is for. She varies her sentence structures and uses dialogue to show insights to what is happening in different town and what happened in the past.  The tone of the story starts out anticipating the outcome of the lottery.  Then, the tone changes at the end, because you know what is going on and it is depressing that something like this would even happen and the people would let this happen. Style Tone

SYMBOLS/ IRONY  The major symbol in this story is the Black Box. It proves how much the tradition in this town means. The fact that after many years they are still stoning people and that they don’t change the way that it has always been done. Then, the date each year never changes either.  The only Irony that I can see in this story is the fact that Tessie shows up late and then has the fate of being stoned

CRITICISM  Biographical Criticism In the biography, Shirley Jackson tells you the reasoning behind the story and helps you understand more what the story means The pointless violence and general inhumanity in our lives is what Shirley was trying to explain to us The fact that they would continue to carry on a tradition only because of the fact that it has been done for so many years is absurd and this is what she is trying to say about society. The absurd things that people do just because people before them did the same exact things.

RELATED TO ANOTHER STORY  A Pair Of Tickets These two stories are similar because they are both rich in tradition. In a pair of tickets, the joy luck club is highly traditional and keeping things the way they used to be, and June is part of then when she decides that she is Chinese. The Lottery is set on tradition with the fact that the lottery is still going on, on the same date, the same exact way even though the rest of the world has seemed to move on.