The Lottery
A beautiful day. A normal town. Its lottery day! Doesn't everyone want to win the lottery?
The Facts
Text: The Lottery Author: Shirley Jackson
Genre: Modern fiction, horror, Year: 1948
Available: The New Yorker Online archive (Free!)
Content Warning: violence, mob violence.
The Fiction
Some of the best short stories become infamous not for their iconic characters, or long term serialized plot, but for their use of the "twist." In a few words these stories set up a simple premise, and by the end have taken a turn so unexpected, so iconic, and so satisfying they linger in the pop culture consciousness forever.
The Lottery, by Shirley Jackson is one of those stories. A classic textbook example of how the short story as a medium can hinge on just the right twist.
Since The Lottery as a story thrives on this twist I would recommend everyone click the link above and read the story first before continuing to read my post since I can't really talk about this one without spoilers. You've been warned!
So The Lottery sets up a close knit small town community on the last day of school. The children (specifically the boys) are collecting and setting up a pile of rocks. We don't know why. The adults gather and begin speaking and gossiping. The men smile but don't quite laugh. We don't know why.
The townspeople seem friendly and close. Everybody knows everybody. There is neighborly chatter and gossip. We learn that today is "Lottery Day" and while we don't know what that is, everything seems calm and orderly. This event happens annually and has been going on for so long some of the rituals around it have been forgotten.
The Lottery commences and the tension in the story starts to rise. The heads of each of the families in town must draw slips of paper from the black box. The men who draw seem tense. When Bill Hutchinson is reveled to have the marked slip of paper, his wife, who was previously characterized as light-hearted and easy going is immediately agitated claiming the Lottery isn't fair. Her pleas are ignored and everyone from the Hutchinson family must now draw slips from the black box. This time Mrs. Hutchinson is revealed to have the marked slip.
The townspeople go to the pile of the stones organized by those school boys, and we discover what happens to the winner of the lottery: they are stoned to death.
The Feeling
The Lottery is a modern short story written and published in the 20th century and yet already recognized as a classic. The premise of a town or community engaging in a lottery that results in trauma or the death of its citizens as a plot has endured, most recently popularized by the premise of the YA novels/film series The Hunger Games.
The Lottery is classified as a horror story. So what horrors in our human psyche does it exploit? There is the fear of the uncanny. There is something wrong with the people/town in this story but as a reader we don't know what till the end. This creates a feeling of tension and unease throughout. Then there is the more visceral fear of violence. The stoning is a particularly gruesome/brutal form of violence.
But this story contains more cerebral fears. There is the fear of our communities turning on us, on being made outsiders, or othered by people we love and trust. The Lottery exposes how fragile our bonds with our community can be, and how easy it would be for them to turn on us. It could be a random event, as small as a dot on a piece of paper, and suddenly you've been made an enemy.
There is the fear of our smallness, and powerlessness. The fear that our voice and concerns will just be ignored by those in power. Then there is the more frightening revelation that when those in power hurt us the people around us will not help. There is the fear that the people who should help protect us and stand up for us will side with tyrannical governments or oppressive traditions and either do nothing to help us, or join in on the violence as well. Against such powerful leaders and the size of such a mob we are rendered helpless.
The brutal stoning at the end of The Lottery is a bloody and dramatic image to this horror story. The twist of this friendly small town quickly devolving into a murderous mob in the name of tradition is really effective. Part of why the story stays in people's mind is the calmness, and civility of the town. The way that the violence is not mindless or uncontrolled but actually well organized and planned. There is something to fear in how human and rationalized this violence is. This town is not a mob made angry and animalistic. These people are polite, and orderly. They've marked this day in their calendrers, they have a routine to follow, and they have rules. There is something we can understand in violence that is an outcome of strong emotions, something we can understand in violence that comes from hatred. But the violence in The Lottery is colder, meticulous, without reason and yet carried out in a very rational way. There is something terrifying in the organization of this violence.
In the end The Lottery is the quintessential short story for two reasons. The first is its excellent use of a twist, creating a turn in the narrative that shocks in its horror and delights in its cleverness. The second is that within the entertainment of the this simple story are entwined the complicated themes and fears discussed above. The Lottery sets up this great twist, reflects on our complicated fears around community, otherness, random violence, organized violence, helplessness, etc, and does it all in less than 3500 words.
Comments