Share your literary essay with the rest of the students that chose this short story. Take some time to read 2 or 3 other essays. Comment on them. Your comment should be about something you noticed them doing well from our lessons. For example, "You did a really good job explaining your evidence
“The Lottery” Short Story Essay
ReplyDeleteAbigail Sanderson
4th hour
The short story “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, is about a village's annual lottery. It would take about three days to set it up, since every year the village grows in size. While most of the original traditions for their lottery have been lost, the box and the pile of stones were always the same. The names would be drawn from the black box and the stones would be for the winner. Now unlike regular lotteries the winner doesn’t get a prize the winner of this lottery gets stoned to death. This is why I believe the theme is “Life is unfair sometimes”. This theme can be shown by the figurative language, the setting, and the dialogue.
The theme in this story can be supported by the figurative language. In the story “The Lottery” there is a lot of symbolism, which is the box, the stones, the black dot, and the village square. The black dot can symbolise death, and the box can symbolise tradition. The village square might symbolise the four corners of the Earth. Earthly instead of heavenly, human created opposed to natural; boxed in or concealed. Finally the stones could symbolise punishment, and burial, they maybe indicate a morbid ceremony.
Irony is the second type of figurative language in “The Lottery”. The idea of a lottery is to win something and the reader is made to believe that the winner will receive some prize, but actually the winners will be stoned to death. Also the protagonist was making a guess of who would be killed and was sure that she wasn’t going to be the winner and was acting like a brat; although in the end she was the one who was chosen and then killed.
The setting can also play a big role in what the theme is. Now in “The Lottery” the author Shirley Jackson never specifies where the village is, but by the events of the story you could make the guess that it is not close to any 3rd world civilizations. The year is probably in the 1800s or early 1900s. Now while life is unfair no matter what period of time it is. Even so, you can usually control how it is going to be, but in their village your life is put into the hands of luck, and it is out of your control if you are the winner of their lottery. People might argue that luck is theme of this story, but life is unfair sometimes fits best because, the only time luck plays a part in the story is during the drawing of the lottery.
Dialogue will also show you the theme, or the interactions between characters in the story. Now the protagonist, Tessie is kinda of the
“Karen” of the village, the person in everyone’s business or is mean to everyone. The villagers don’t really like her, because of the way she acts. So in the end when Tessie’s was the one with the black dot you could tell that no one really cared. Also while their were rocks being thrown at her she kept saying how it wasn’t fair; which contributes to the theme of how life is unfair sometimes.
All in all “The Lottery” is a somewhat darker story with symbolism, irony, an interesting setting, and it has a lot of dialogue. There might be a lot of different themes that go with this story, but life is unfair sometimes, fits the best for the theme. This is definitely an older story but we can still learn a lot from it.