The word crazy is defined as a mentally deranged person, or done in a wild, aggressive manner. However, in many works of writing crazy can be portrayed in a variety of forms. In the Lottery, you see crazy in the concept of society and the blind following of tradition. This story also gives the term for crazy to describe the reactions of the woman who is being stoned. A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner, in contrast, shows crazy as a result of death and denial. Lastly, by contrast and comparison, you can see crazy by the irrational actions of Neddie in The Swimmer. The Swimmer is different in that it views crazy through mental debility and denial. By looking at these you can see overlapping definitions. Many short stories include unreliable characters as well as absurd problems. Nevertheless these three stories offer perfect examples of connotation in that crazy can be read in many ways.
The Lottery is an excellent example of a senseless society; this is what makes the storyline crazy. In this writing the village members blindly follow the tradition of the Lottery, which entails the chosen person to be stoned to death by community members, friends, and even family. The peoples misguided knowledge makes them believe that it would be crazy not to do the lottery, this is shown when Mr. Adams says “that over in the north village they’re talking of giving up the lottery” and Old Man Warner responds by calling them a “pack of crazy fools” and saying “there is nothing but trouble in that. Warner degrades others decision to go against the tradition of the society (page. 4) General knowledge tells you that stoning a person to death simply because of tradition is wrong, most can agree that in itself is crazy. ...
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...ifferent words. Crazy has a different meaning to many people. These reading are completely different, yet they still can be described by this one word. The lottery uses a crazy society and reaction, A Rose for Emily a crazy woman who is mental ill, and The Swimmer, which gives off a mixture of crazy as a result of past occurrences. This is why you need to process the information given off throughout stories you read. There is usually a different shade of interpretation in each story and you can relate it to others.
Works Cited
Jago, Carol. "Chapter 7: Love and Relationships - A Rose for Emily." Literature & Composition: Reading, Writing, Thinking. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2011. 657-63. Print.
http://sites.middlebury.edu/individualandthesociety/files/2010/09/jackson_lottery.pdf
http://202.121.96.130/Download/20091207184417_734640623434.pdf
Ulf Kirchdorfer, "A Rose for Emily: Will the Real Mother Please Stand Up?” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 10/2016, Volume 29, Issue 4, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0895769X.2016.1222578
5. Roberts, Edgar V., and Henry E. Jacobs. "A Rose for Emily." Literature: an Introduction to Reading and Writing. 4th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/ Prentice Hall, 2008. 76-81. Print.
The villagers don’t care about the black box or the ritual, but they do care about the stones which signify murder. In “The Lottery”, each villager cares about his or her own individual survival, even if it means stoning one’s own family. An example of a family can be seen through Hutchinson family and their daughter Tessie, who got stoned. They’ve done this for so long, they don’t question how sinful it is. It just seems like the ordinary thing to do for them. That behavior can be proved by “… the whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o’clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner (Jackson 278).” The quote demonstrates that the villagers can murder someone, then casually continue on with their daily lives. They can do that action without thinking they did anything wrong. “The Lottery” encourages the villagers to have egotistical
Faulkner, William. A Rose For Emily. 10th ed. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2010. 681-687. Print.
The plot as a whole in “The Lottery” is filled with ironic twists. The whole idea of a lottery is to win something, and the reader is led to believe that the winner will receive some prize, when in actuality they will be stoned to death by the rest of the villagers. The villagers act very nonchalant upon arriving at the lottery; which makes it seem as if it is just another uneventful day in a small town. Considering the seriousness of the consequences of the lottery, the villagers do not make a big deal about it. Under the same note it is ironic that many of the original traditions of the lottery, such as the recital and the salute, had long been forgotten. All that the villagers seemed to remember was the ruthless killing of a random person. It also seems strange that they let the equipment for the lottery, the black box, get into such a poor condition.
Kirszner, Laurie G. and Stephen R. Mandell "A Rose for Emily" Compact Literature by William Falkner 8th ed. Boston:Wadsworth, 2013. 220-26
Moreover, the diction of the narrator and his repeated pleas to the reader to believe this thought, while not truly convincing, serve as a means to support his case. He asks, ”How, then, am I mad?” and “but why will you say that I am mad?” Beyond what could be considered a maniacal monologue, the narrator’s creepy fascination with the old man’s eye further distinguishes mental illness. What is described as “a pale blue eye, with a film over it” is, in all probability, a cataract, which is not nearly as evil as
Shirley Jackson describes the lottery being an annual event where someone gets randomly drawn to win the prize of getting stoned to death, Tradition which no one has ever questioned its purpose or opposed to it. “Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones” (Jackson 7). People in “The Lottery” were so accustomed to the tradition that no kind of emotion or feeling was shown at the time of stoning, no matter if it was a family member or a close friend. Their blind acceptance to the lottery made murder become natural that time of the
“The Lottery” is a short story about an event that takes place every year in a small village of New England. When the author speaks of “the lottery” he is referencing the lottery of death; this is when the stoning of a village member must give up his or her life. The villagers gather at a designated area and perform a customary ritual which has been practiced for many years. The Lottery is a short story about a tradition that the villagers are fully loyal to and represents a behavior or idea that has been passed down from generation to generation, accepting and following a rule no matter how cruel or illogical it is. Friends and family become insignificant the moment it is time to stone the unlucky victim.
Mosby, Charmaine Allmon. "A Rose For Emily." Masterplots, Fourth Edition (2010): 1-3. Literary Reference Center. Web. 4 Apr. 2014.
The point of view of tradition in The Lottery by Shirley Jackson is the normal once of year gathering on the townspeople. This gathering is held in order to pick, via a lottery drawing, to decide who in the town is going to be stoned to death. “The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o’clock; in some towns there were so many people the lottery took two days and had started on June 26th, but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, and the whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o’clock in morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.” (Kennedy & Gioia, 2013, pp. 251). The fact that the people gather and discuss everyday issue prior to the start of the lottery all point to the blind tradition of selecting some to be stoned to death.
The far-fetched is made believable only because of the narrator’s complete professional façade. By itself, speaking of a mass murderer’s typing ability does seem psychotic, but the narrator has so completely described every aspect of the listener’s new surroundings that any individual part of the surrounding does not seem overly important. The characters are merely present and described as they are. This description does not affect any character, so there is no real action to be deemed unusual, unstable, or
In "The Lottery" Shirley Jackson fills her story with many literary elements to mask the evil. The story demonstrates how it is in human nature to blindly follow traditions. Even if the people have no idea why they follow.
Alice, Petry. A Rose for Emily.’” Explicator Spring 86. Vol. 44 Issue 3. p. 52. 3 p.. Ebook
---. "A Rose for Emily." Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. 5th ed. New York: Harper Collins, 1991.