The story contains very few characters, which only adds to the eerie feeling that the reader begins to feel as the story progresses. These characters include:
Bobby Martin: A young boy introduced at the beginning of the story. We are told that at the beginning of the story, he has already stuffed his pockets full of stones in preparation for the event. He and his friends have also made a 'community pile' of stones. Bobby and his friends serve as a grim foreshadowing to the reader that while everything is fine at the initial glance, something ugly is coming.
Joe Summers: The man in charge of the black box, and the lottery. "He was a round-faced, jovial man and he ran the coal business, and people were sorry for him. because he had no children and his wife was a scold." Joe is close in my mind to a Santa Claus figure. This carries with it the connotation that Joe is a nice, friendly man, which is only reaffirmed in the story with his greetings to the household members as the draw from the box. He and the rest of the town are awkwardly cast into this sort of persona in order to contrast the dark secret that the villagers are hiding.
Bill Hutchinson: Husband of Tessie, the woman stoned at the end of the story. He bears a strong connection to the tradition of the town, going so far as to tell his wife to shut up when she complains about the drawing not being fair.
Tessie Hutchinson: The unfortunate winner of the lottery. Tessie complains at the end of the story that the lottery is not fair, however her words fall on deaf ears as the first stone is cast into her head and suddenly the town was "upon her".
Old Man Warner: An elderly man who has been is celebrating his 77th year in the drawing. He complains throughout the story in the typical fashion of an old man about the younger generation. Ironically, his complaints are most often about how the younger generations don't respect tradition, and that the original ritual had been lost or corrupted by the current inhabitants of the village. Warner throws the reader into a familiar place, deceiving the reader into believing that everything is fine within the town.
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Brief Summary
"The Lottery" tells a story of a small American town which on the surface appears to be the home to roughly 300 average Americans. The town is readying itself for a ritual known only to the reader as "the lottery". The story begins on the clear and sunny morning of June 27th, however the mood of its residents is one of a strange, eerie nervousness. Children gather stones in hopes of a good harvest in the coming year, and the town collects around a small black box. In the first round of the lottery, the head of each household draws a slip of paper from the black box, followed by the second round where each family member draws a slip. After, each person checks their paper to see who's carries a black dot at the center. Tessie, a woman who arrives late to the lottery discovers that her paper bears the black dot, and such 'wins' the lottery. For her prize, Tessie is then stoned to death by the town.
About Shirley Jackson
- The Lottery
- Shirley Jackson (December 14, 1916, San Francisco, California - August 8, 1965, Bennington, Vermont) was an influential American author. A popular writer in her time, her work has received increasing attention from literary critics in recent years. She has influenced such writers as Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Nigel Kneale and Richard Matheson. She is best known for the short story "The Lottery" (1948), which suggests a secret, sinister underside to bucolic small-town America. In her critical biography of Jackson, Lenemaja Friedman notes that when "The Lottery" was published in the June 26, 1948 issue of The New Yorker, it received a response that "no New Yorker story had ever received." Hundreds of letters poured in that were characterized by, as Jackson put it, "bewilderment, speculation and old-fashioned abuse."