Now that the quarter is over and spring is here, it's time to conclude our weekly sessions. This begs the question, what have I gained from reading this story a few times over the course of the quarter? Overall, I felt like when I entered this class that it would be somewhat like any other English class that I've taken, and all I would have to do is simply regurgitate what a professor had told me that an author had intended for me to take from their story. While this style of teaching might be great for gaining an understanding of literary techniques, I feel that by the level we're at everyone should have a basic understanding of how authors do things. After doing a few menial responses on the short stories we were required to read, you get into the swing of looking beyond the text to find something within the story that you didn't see before. This was especially prevalent in our discussions of the midterm story, "The End of Something". While Hemingway might not have intentionally meant to jam pack his story with tons of imagery or metaphorical parallels, we still found them. This leads me to tell you that probably the biggest lesson that I've learned from this class, and reading the stories over and over is, much like Mr. Griffith said, that the author is only entitled to his/her intepretation of the story they write. Once it is released, literary imagery, metaphorical parallels, allegorical themes, even character thought process is all subject to the reader who is interpreting the work and where they are in their life at the moment.
I initially chose "The Lottery" specifically because I had read it when I was younger, and was vaguely familiar with the details of the story. I assure you that my understanding and view of the story has changed drastically since I was 16. Not only am I able to detect things that I was not able to before, but I am able to analyze them in a different light because of...well hopefully because of differences in maturity and life status. The method that I chose, I also feel was an effective one. After doing the midterm it became apparent to me that other people had different ways of viewing the same text. Instead of trying to view things from other people's minds, which would be impossible, I think that viewing different aspects of the story and focusing on those brings a pretty good light on things that you hadn't thought of or seen before when initially reading the story. Even in a story as straightforward as "The Lottery" is, there were definitely things that I discovered on the 2nd or 3rd trip through the story.
Conclusively, the class was an interesting look into the works of a few interesting stories. I learned quite a bit more than I had intended to, and perhaps changed a few things on how I will read literature in the future. In a world that demands qualifications, analytical skills in anything, be it in literature or graph theory, are important to us in a number of ways. Hopefully you've had a good time teaching us, it was nice to have an open ended class where discussion was encouraged.
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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."