Summary Of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery

“The Lottery”

“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson is about a lottery, but not an ordinary modern day lottery. In this village the lottery was every year on June 27th, the people gathered around in the square except for Mr. Dunbar and Mrs. Hutchinson. Mr. Summers the lottery conductor begins to start the lottery when Mrs. Hutchinson comes. All the families draw a piece of paper and find out that the Hutchinson’s have the black dot on their slip of paper. The whole family of five draw a piece of paper and Mrs. Hutchinson gets the black dot, the village is surrounding her with rocks while she screamed “It isn’t fair, it isn’t right.” The purpose of the lottery is to continue the tradition of “sacrificing” someone for a good harvest later.

The town has an old, shabby black box that they use to hold all the papers for the lottery, the box floats around town when the lottery is not happening. Line 70 it says “ The original paraphernalia for the lottery had been lost long ago, and the black box now resting on the stool had been put into use even before Old Man Warner, the oldest man in town, was born...No one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box.” This show how glued these people are to the

were talking about how other towns had given up the lottery and Old Man Warner’s response was says “”Used to be a Saying about ‘Lottery in June, Corn be heavy soon.’ First thing you know, we’d all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns.”” This means that when someone was stoned to death in June, the harvest will be successful. Then he goes on to say that if we stop than we’ll be eating acorns and chickweed not corn and other crops. When the village gets ready to stone Mrs. Hutchinson it says “Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones” This quote shows this tradition and how long they’ve been doing this for, and how’s it’s like stuck in their