The Lottery Case

The Lottery

In her story "The Lottery", Shirley Jackson writes about a village that partakes in a lottery event. Every family that is part of this small village draws his/her name in a black box, but there is only one person who gets picked and is therefore is "the lottery winner". The day of the event you will find children of all ages rushing after school to gather up stones. Once the event starts the lottery winner is chosen and will then be stoned to death by the whole village, including his/her family, by the stones that were gathered by the young children.

Every morning on June 27th the village, from young to old, has a gathering by the post office and the bank at around ten o'clock, the place where the villagers met is known as the square. On this day the children, especially, start collecting a large number of stones and pile them up together in a corner. The men began to gather first, inspecting their children and talking amongst each other about common things. The women later start showing up and walk towards their husbands greeting one another with smiles on their faces. Once the whole family is gathered all they could do is wait patiently for every family to gather up and for the speaker to begin.

While all this is happening Mr. Summers, the man that runs the local business and is the speaker of the lottery event, rushes over to the stage with a little black box and along follows Mr. Grave, the postmaster, carrying a three-legged stool. The stool is placed in the center of the stage and on top goes the black box that is all beat up; it is hardly black at all anymore. It has been said that the black box that is now standing on the stage was made with pieces from the previous one, the one that had be originally made since the first people settled down to make the village here. With that said, every time that Mr. Summers suggested buying a new box the villagers would ignore him because who wants to break tradition?

Although many traditions were broken by now the black box was still a very important one and no one dared to replace it. The purpose of the little black box is to have all the villagers name in there, every member of the family has to write his/her name on a piece of paper and in to the box. That is how Mr. Summers determines who the lottery winner will be. There are times when a member of the family would draw his/her name twice so another member of the family will not have to put his/her name in the black box to avoid from being the lottery winner. A son or daughter would most likely be the one to draw his/her name twice for the parent; this was looked as a good gesture.

As soon as Mr. Summers was ready to begin with his speech Mrs. Hutchinson, came hastily through the direction of the square. Mrs. Delacroix reminded her that she had forgot what day it is today and Mrs. Hutchinson laughed and told her that she looked outside her window and saw that her kids were no longer outside playing