The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

The short story Lottery is the classic work of famous American novelist Shirley Jackson.It narrators the story about the people of a small town held an universal activity of lottery , and the person who got the lottery would be hit to death by stones for a better harvest of the following year. Shirley Jackson illustrate that democratic methods can still be a collective atrocity that destroys the individual and even the murder in the so-called social activities of equal opportunity for all even in the democratic form of collective participation. In my opinion, this classic work is so short but profound that it satirized the desired social system in people’s mind and exposed the ugliness of human nature. That is why Jackson himself admitted: "even if I write and publish such a story, people will never forget my name.”

Mrs Jackson focused on details and plot by plenty of literary devices in order to emphasize her significant thesis about society at that time. Firstly, Mrs Jackson used setting and foreshadowing to lead to the disgusting truth. For instance, “the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green,”this sentence described the beautiful and vivid environment that it make readers have a positive emotion which is contrasted with the pain and sorrow at the end of the story; “Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones,” author foreshadowed the truth of the lottery by described stones collection among the children which surprised readers and emphasized nausea and ugliness of the tradition and ritual. Except that,The names of the characters in the story are rich in symbolism. For example, “Summers”, in charge of lottery activities, means “summer", in which the plural form refers to the passage of time. His assistant, Graves, meaning "tomb", it was suggested that every time the result of lottery is the death of one person. The name Delacroix is meant to be "cross"; But at the very beginning of the story, the author made it clear that the villagers always misread the name and completely forgot the correct pronunciation. The implication of this is that it is all about Christianity - the villagers have long been unable to properly understand the true teachings of Christianity. Moreover, the crumbling three-legged stool was seen as a metaphor for the loss of the authority of the trinity; The old black box is a symbol of death as well as the old and traditional chaos and blindness of the villagers. In addition, the black box is made from the old box of old boxes, which also suggests that the tradition of the activities represented has deteriorated and is far behind that times.At the aspect of society, what the author criticized is not the evils of imperialism, colonialism or fascism as we all know, but the "majority rule" of hope -- democracy. Jackson narrate a story of blind following by a series of literary devices above that touch the essence: even if in the collective participation form of democracy, the so-called everybody have a equality of opportunity, the democratic method also could be the killing of collective or individual violence. As in “The Lottery" the decision of killing Mrs. Hutchinson collectively, it is so relentlessly broke the illusion of democracy, ruthlessly confirmed that "democracy is in addition to other forms has tried, the worst form of rule" (wen · Churchill).

“The Lottery” not only described how democracy perpetrate violence, but also exposed the ugliness of human nature by literary devices. Firstly, Mrs Jackson use irony to emphasize it. For instance,Mrs. Delacroix said, "You're in time, though. They're still talking away up there;” "Seems like there's no time at all between lotteries any more," Mrs. Delacroix said to Mrs. Graves in the back