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.

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Romanticism or Realism?

Is this short story a realistic depiction of small town USA or a romantic exaggeration of the truth? "The Lottery" most definitely is categorized under realism. In fact, Shirley Jackson is quite often noted as a "master of realism". Many, if not all of the characters in the story depict some sort of realistic character, and do not hold any archetypal value or quality of being "larger than life". The speech patterns of such characters tends to be more towards that of an informal common type, depicting something anyone could expect to hear out of their neighbors in a suburb. One of the biggest elements that I feel swings this story towards realism is the fact that the ending is not a happy one.

More humorously, when the story was originally published in the June 26th, 1948 issue of The New Yorker, the story was met with a response that "no New Yorker story had ever receieved". Many people were so drawn in by the story that they felt that it may be an accurate depiction of her home town, thus there was a lot of confusion and angst about the story being untrue. Jackson later offered this explanation:

"Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives."


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