“The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson opens on a warm June day in a town of about three hundred people. The story takes place in a small village, where apparently people lives in a friendly atmosphere. They speak to each other in a gregarious way and know each other very well like a “big family”. I put “big family” between quotations marks because the end is very surprising compared with the beginning, which is very quiet and supposedly everyone is calm and relaxed. The reader expects something else at the end, like a good prize for the winner. But it all changes when the every year lottery stars. This is a tradition that has been there for many generations.
It is a major event and very weird because they randomly choose one person to be the winner, but is violently stoned by friends and family. The prize is not one we would wish to have. The winner’s luck is Death, by friends and family. The way Jackson describes the people in this village and how friendly they are, suggests that people are not always like they seem to be. She implies that inside every person’s congeniality, there may be an evil one. The villagers killed stone the person who gets the black slot.
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