Examples Of The Old Tradition In The Lottery By Shirley Jackson

The Old Tradition of the Lottery There are so many customs in the world today that people conduct without thinking. “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson is an example of this process. This story is about one town that performs a certain ritual amongst them annually. They hold a lottery each year, where the townspeople pick slips of paper out of a black box and they have a tradition of stoning whoever wins, a custom they continue, simply because they have always done so. Although the word “lottery” has a positive connotation, the audience is shocked by the twist ending when they discover that Mrs. Hutchinson’s “prize” is death by stoning. The villagers are blind to the brutality of their actions of killing innocent people, because the tradition overpowers their morality. The village has a …show more content…
For example, in the story, the oldest man in the town, Old Man Warner says,“There’s always been lottery.” This shows that the lottery has been a tradition for as long as he can remember. Also, Old Man Warner thinks that the process of the lottery is important for living in this modern life because without this process they cannot progress ahead. For instance, the people from the village in the North were talking of giving up the lottery. The Old Man describes the effects of the lottery by saying, “They’ll be wanting to go back to living in caves”. This quote conveys the idea that the Old Man believes something bad will happen, such as a bad harvest, if the villagers quit the tradition of the lottery. This theme of tradition overpowering morality is further developed through the example of the lottery box. In the story, Jackson writes, “Every year, after the lottery,