Discrimination In Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery'

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Recommended: Universal Declaration of human rights essay

Zachary Horn
Period 6
10/19/14
We, as human beings, must be willing to accept/tolerate people who are different from ourselves. But there are also limits to what we must tolerate. When we look at the human race as a whole, there have been a lot of cases of people being mistreated for who they are. Human beings have basic rights, and they were being violated. In 1949, the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights was written, with hopes of it laying out those basic rights that all people deserve. In the Collections 1 stories, there is everything from discrimination to mistreatment of someone for little to no viable reason at all.

In The Lottery, the village’s residents are forced to participate in a drawing, similar to the lottery held here in

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    Tradition is huge in small towns and families and allows for unity through shared values, stories, and goals from one generation to the next. Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” carries that theme of tradition. The story follows a small town that performs the tradition of holding an annual lottery in which the winner gets stoned to death. It (tradition) is valued amongst human societies around the world, but the refusal of the villagers in “The Lottery” to let go of a terrifying long-lasting tradition suggests the negative consequences of blindly following these traditions such as violence and hypocrisy.

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