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The Lottery by Shirley Jackson: An Exposition of Conformity in Society.
Shirley Jackson's The Lottery: An Exposition of Conformity ...
Submitted by oppapers on September 27, 2004
Category: English
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Shirley Jackson's The Lottery:
An Exposition of Conformity in Society
The Lottery, a short story by the nonconformist author Shirley Jackson, represents communities, America, the world, and conformist society as a whole by using setting and most importantly symbolism with her inventive, cryptic writing style. It was written in 1948, roughly three years after the liberation of a World War II concentration camp Auschwitz. Even today, some people deny that the Holocaust ever happened. Jackson shows through the setting of the story, a small, close knit town, that even though a population can ignore evil, it is still prevalent in society (for example: the Harlem Riots; the terrorist attacks on September 11; the beating of Rodney King.) In The Lottery, year after year, even since Old Man Warner, the oldest man in town, was a child, the same ritual has gone on. It is as if the community never learns from its previous mistakes. As long as no one in the town speaks up about such a twisted yearly event, nothing is ever going to change. If Martin Luther King or Malcolm X wouldn't have raised their voices against the prejudice that they had experienced their entire lives, we might still be living in a segregated world, which was once thought to be "okay." This is similar to The Lottery, in which the townspeople are brainwashed into believing that this ritual is normal. For example, Old Man Warner is outraged when he hears that the north village might give up the lottery, calling them "a pack of crazy fools." Even little Davie Hutchinson participates in the stoning of his own mother, unaware that something can be done to change the way things are. Jackson is showing how a person would rather sacrifice their own family than speak up to or question authority. Rosa Park is a hero to the African American Community. She is the only black woman out of millions who had been sitting on the back of a bus for years, and actually had the guts to challenge...
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