The Lottery

The Lottery

Theme Response

5/18/12

Nick Woerishofer

            Do you think that stoning people for no reason is right? Well people in the short story “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, do. They play the lottery in a different way than we do. There a number of themes in this story, I think the main one is defiantly blindly following tradition. In this story their lottery is way different then out lottery. In our lottery if you win you become richer then Richie Rich but in their version it like the complete opposite. If you win you get stoned. The people in that village just follow tradition exactly the way their ancestors did. Nothing changed; they don’t understand that stoning people is wrong; they just do exactly what they were taught to do.

            Now a days we would never do that, because to us it seems savage, but to them it was normal, it is a tradition, and they don’t know any better. To them the odds seriously have to be in their favors, because if they get unlucky it means death. During the lottery everyone must throw a rock. Even Tessie’s best friend threw one, in fact she threw the biggest rock. Another book that has this theme is the Hunger Games because they blindly follow the tradition of killing people for food. In real life if you win the lottery, it's a good thing, but not in this story