Hi, I'm Rebecca Balcarcel.
Let's talk about "The Lottery," the short story by Shirley Jackson.
The plot is not too hard to understand, except that you don't realize
what's going on until the very end.
People gather in the town square.
Then they seem to be gathering up stones, especially the children, and then there's
the actual lottery.
That means a drawing where somebody is going to "win."
Now it turns out that after everybody pulls out their pieces of paper, and there's this
elaborate ritual where family units go and then- then
the actual family members draw their numbers.
But finally, Tessie Hutchinson, one of the housewives, one of the mothers in
the community, gets the paper with the black dot on it, and she doesn't win anything good.
In fact she is marked to die.
The villagers grab up stones and stone her to
death, and that's the end.
So why did Shirley Jackson put such a horrifying story together, and what is she trying to
say with it?
Well, we get one explanation of why this lottery even exists from one of the
characters, Old Man Warner.
He explains that there's some connection between the corn that's growing and this ritual.
So he says, "Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon."
And that tells us that these people thought of it as a fertility ritual.
Like, if you kill somebody then the crops will be good.
That's the only rationale, inside the story, that we get.
So we get this sense of superstition, I guess.
And when people talk to Old Man Warner about not doing the Lottery and discontinuing it,
he says, "Oh, those..."
you know, "those pack of fools, those young people, they don't understand and they don't
know what they're doing."
Other villages have stopped the Lottery, but not this one.
This one keeps going.
So inside the story, the internal logic is just that it's tradition,
and we do it 'cause we've always done it, and maybe because it relates to successful
crops.
Now, outside the story, I think we can look at it and see a couple things.
Obviously Tessie Hutchinson is just as likely to stone other people.
When it turns out that she's a victim, oh, now she doesn't like the lottery, now she
says it's not fair, but everybody else goes along with it,
and you have to figure that she would have gone along with it too, if it hadn't been
her family and herself, uh, sacrificed.
So you get the idea that everybody's motivation just has to do with the fact that they have
a lot of peer pressure, like, "Everyone does this, so of course
we're going to do it."
Or we could say that they're motivated by, uh, tradition.
They're not examining the tradition, they just blindly go on and- and perform this
horrific act.
And it's sanctioned by all the authorities of the town, the postmaster's there, uh, you
know, Mr. Summers, everybody that administers this thing, they
have the credibility, the- the authority to do this, and people give them that authority,
so you could say that the social structure has deemed that someone will die
every year, and these people just go along with it.
So maybe the story is trying to say people should not just go along with traditions without
thinking.
Or maybe the story's trying to stay people should stand
up to authority.
When authority is wrong, you should protest.
And we might even have a critique of democracy here,
because apparently everybody wants to do it, but that doesn't make it right.
So sometimes the group may move us in the wrong direction, or just because the group
has agreed to do it doesn't necessarily mean that
it is moral to do, or necessary, or good to do.
Now we also have, I think, a critique of small town life.
Shirley Jackson moved into a small town, Bennington,
Vermont, as it turns out, where she was never accepted.
And knowing that little tidbit about the author makes me think
that she was thinking of how cruel people can be.
It looks like a sweet little town, but gosh, if they don't accept you, or they decide that
there's something different about you that's uncomfortable for them, you
might be ostracized, you might be shunned, left out of the society, and it's not the
same as being stoned or killed, but you can see the capacity for cruelty, even
in what looks like a perfectly sweet, friendly, small town.
Now also if you add this to the history going on at the time
that the story was written, we can see that it might be a wakeup call to say that humans
are capable of evil, even Americans, even small town America is capable of
evil.
The story is written right after World War II, so America has this, uh, good guy complex
at this point, because America plus Britain has defeated the Nazi forces
and Hitler.
So everybody feels really, like, "Oh, we did a great job and good for us," and so on.
But part of that good, good, good feeling only comes when you try to
say, "Well, we're good, therfore someone else is bad."
So, "Oh, those other folks, the- the Germans and people who went along with the Nazi regime,
they're just different than we are."
When in fact, they're not different.
We're all humans, we're all capable of something like this.
We too need to guard against doing things that
are wrong, and Shirley Jackson is suggesting that we need to examine ourselves carefully,
examine our actions carefully, introspect deeply, and live a conscious life,
instead of just getting involved with something without realizing.
Whether it's from peer pressure, so- social pressure, townspeople pressure, national pressure,
realize that each of us could be capable of this sort of thing, and we need to guard against
it.
Well, that's what I think about this story.
There's so much more you can explore here.
Pages and pages have been written about the symbolism of the names -- we have someone
named Mr. Graves, for example -- the symbolism of the
box, the fact that it's black and- and mysterious and hidden and old.
So elements of this story can be analyzed in detail, but this gives a broad outline
of some of the issues that I think Shirely Jackson raises.
Alright, hope you will join me for another video.