Dramatic Tragedy In Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery'

Shirley Jackson’s third-person point of view in “the Lottery” creates dramatic irony through a sequence of events that leads to a horrifying conclusion. Jackson creates a scenario where common people enjoy doing businesses at their hometown; this leads to her description of the lottery in order for readers to see the transition from a happy setting to a scary conclusion. In summary, Jackson’s point of view gives readers opportunity to discover the major character’s conclusion through setting, characters, and irony.’

Jackson starts her story with a beautiful setting. In the introduction, she gives more details about the village than the lottery. She describes the people, the children, the weather, the date, and the social environment taken place. However, little details about the lottery leaves her readers wondering about what the lottery

Jackson’s description about the kids gathering stones seems innocent (Jackson, 327). However, Jackson twists this description to imply that the crowd threw stones at Tesse Hutchinson for receiving a black spot (Jackson, 332). This ironic scene changes the readers’ symbolism of pebbles. What Jackson did is to describe what common people would do, and twist the story into another meaning. Usually, little kids would gather pebbles to play stone skipping; however, this became what a religious act that people would do: stone a person to death. What leads to Tesse’s fate is the ignorance of the people to cancel the tradition, Tesse’s call of unfairness in the lottery, and the surprising discovery of Bill holding a blank sheet of paper (Jackson, 331-332). These events foreshadow Tesse’s death, including the setting and character description. This makes the author’s point of view a success to show enough details about the setting, characters, and events to leave the readers with a surprising, depressing conclusion. Truly, a lottery can change a person’s life in the author’s