How Does the Lottery Explore the Theme of Tradition and Its Dangers?

How does the lottery explore the theme of tradition and its dangers?

Introduction

Main Idea: Traditions sometimes

Tradition may become more important than keeping a family, people who live in small towns tend to be more homogeneous

The person who is in charge of the box someone is not any better.

Symbol of the black box.

        They change traditions but they don’t change certain traditions

                    If it is a tradition, they should change the entire thing

        The short story “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson is set in a small village where they hold a lottery every year as a custom. Ironically, the winner of the lottery in the village is presented with death. This contradicts the common positive idea of winning a lottery. In the setting of the story, no one questions or even complains about the lottery tradition  that the village is upholding. As a result, one person in the village is sacrified for just the sake of the tradition. Traditions which only apply to a small group of people tend to be kept and conceived wheas traditions applied to a huge population  may not be kept and often have many amenments. Thus, in such a small village, no one may question or even wonder about the origin and purpose of the tradition despite being inhumane.

        Not questioning the tradition might be the signal that one should not be following that tradition. In the short story, no one questions whether the tradition is right or wrong. Everyone in the village knows the result of the lottery which is death and everyone is afraid of it. For many people, it is an instinct to question; however, for certain people, questioning is hard. Especially in a small village with less diversity compared to the bigger community, it is possible that many would people are the type that is having difficulty questioning. Therefore, the people in the village might just accept that it is a ritual, custom that they follow and no one really asks why. This is shown to be dangerous in the short story because it involves death sacrifices.

Traditions that relate to death are often quite dangerous. Regardless of what tradition it is, if it involves death, it should be a good idea to question the tradition before following it.

http://cs-wwwarchiv.cs.unibas.ch/lehre/fs10/cs304/_Downloads/williams.pdf

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