Hi, I’m the editor of The New Yorker magazine and I’ve seen quite a lot of people confused about The Lottery or described it as “perverted” and “gratuitously disagreeable”, so I’m making this video of me analyzing the story to give everyone a new perspective when looking at The Lottery by Shirley Jackson.
The setting of the story is set in Bennington, Vermont in her story her village is a rural area surrounded by people living narrow lives and maybe this is the reason why they are so narrow-minded, for example, the villager Old Man Warner wanted to continue the lottery just because of they always have one.
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Now moving on to characterization Tessie Hutchinson (Mrs. Hutchinson) is the main character of this story. She first appears when the annual lottery is about to begin and she is the only one who is late, her excuse is that she forgets what day it was, and this kind of foreshadows she will win the lottery at the end. The author purposely uses her action in line 106: “Mrs.Hutchinson came hurriedly along the path to the square” to show she is blinded by the tradition and she can’t wait for the lottery to begin until she becomes a victim herself and screams not fair while getting brutally stoned to death. The other two characters I want to talk about are Old Man Warner and Mr.Summers. Old Man Warner is the oldest man in the village and is pretty much a fogy, he doesn’t accept new changes and wants the annual lottery to go on forever, in line 195: “Listening to the young folks, nothing’s good enough for them. Next thing you know, they'll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody works anymore, and live that way for a while. There used to be a saying about ‘Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.’ First thing you know, we’d all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns. There’s always been a lottery,” he added petulantly.” this shows he not only wants it to go on forever he thought removing it will cause the village to return to a primitive state. Mr.Summers is the leader of the village, the one who volunteers for civic activities and organizes things like Halloween parties, square dances, and the infamous lottery. He is good at keeping the lottery progressing in line 23: “Well everyone,” Mr.Summers said, “that was done pretty fast, and now we’ve got to be hurrying a little more to get done in time.” this shows even Mrs.Hutchinson is screaming not fair he doesn’t show any bit of empathy to her, he chose to keep the lottery going.
The story has a chronological plot, it is made up of three major events. First, is the gathering of the villagers and each family representative takes a slip of paper and sees who got the one with the black dot on it. Second, in the climax, Tessie opens her slip of paper discovers the black spot, and starts screaming not fair. Last, the resolution, Tessie got to the center of a cleared space and got stoned to death.
The story is written in a very detached third-person view. The author only gives us information on the lottery's progress but never describes a character’s emotion, This helps the ending become very unexpected because our only indication is through villagers' nervous manners, rather than insights into what the villagers thought in their minds.
There are many possible themes in the story, but the one I’m focusing on is conformity can lead to bad endings. The Lottery by Shirley Jackson is about conforming to rules without noticing it is wrong until we are the ones who are victims. As we can see throughout the story, the villagers are just conforming to the annual lottery just because it is a tradition, especially for Old Man Warner in line 198: “There always been a lottery,” he added petulantly.” he just follows it because it’s there. Most of the villagers just conform to the rules, but there are still people like Adam who question it in line 192: “that over the north village they’re talking about giving up the lottery.”. The other evidence is Tessie Hutchinson, she likes the idea of the lottery at first, but quickly as the story progressed we found out that she became the victim and at that time she finally noticed that this system is wrong and should be stopped. In our lives, there are many things we just conform to without realizing it is wrong. For example, when your friend goes into a store and steals a thing and you don’t stop it. This shows the author wants us to think more before conforming to anything.
There are many literary devices used in this story. The main one I’ll talk about is symbolism. The color black is a symbol of death, mourning, or punishment. The “black” box in the story is used to draw lotteries and the one with the “black” mark points out the winner of the lottery. In line 64: “The black box grew shabbier each year; by now it was no longer completely black but splintered badly along one side to show the original wood color, and in some places faded or stained.” this shows the box is old and needs to be replaced but they did nothing about it, like although some of the villagers know the tradition should be stopped, yet they do nothing about it. The other symbolism I find quite interesting is the last names of Mr.Summers and Mr.Graves, Summers represents the prime of life, growth, warmth, and blossoming; and Graves represents death, the place of entombment. This creates a balance between life and death, life brings death and death comes life.
The Lottery by Shirey Jackson may be hard to understand at first, but hopefully, after you finish watching my analysis on it you’ll stop being confused or stop calling her “perverted” and have a better idea of what the message the author is trying to send us with this short story.
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