The Lottery

What have I taken from this?

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.

On my friend Ben

Generally every Monday or Thursday he and I head down to our local BW3's and have a few discussions about what's going on. It's a great way to get out of the house. Because this is so informal, I decided not to record word for word his interpretation of the story itself. However, I did find his interpretation of it to be somewhat similar to mind, except he didn't catch any of the foreshadowing, or character traits that might hint towards the ending. He claimed to be oblivious the whole time that something sinister was going on behind the scenes. While I find this hard to believe, it's not really something I would argue with him about. As for this conversation being at all insightful, the only thing I took from it relates back to our histories. My high school and grade school were both intensely English based. In 8th grade, we read "Oedipus Rex", a story which some high school seniors still don't fully comprehend. Ultimately, I think that his outlook on the story was due to lack of either caring or lack of education on the skills or tools needed to read a story, and read past it. As Flynn would describe it, the text dominated him.

An interview with Shirley Jackson

After talking to Michael Griffith about "Hooper Gets a Perm" and "Zugzwang", I feel like it would be extremely interesting to ask Shirley Jackson about her experiences as a writer and what elements of herself went into her work. However, seeing as she is dead this is not possible. It's very interesting to read that when her work was published, there was such a public outrage demanding to know where this town featured in "The Lottery" was located, and why they allowed this yearly tradition. You almost have to ask yourself, if this work was fiction, what part of Shirley Jackson could conjure up such a dark story? For Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Harcraft's Twentieth Century Authors (1954), she wrote:

"I very much dislike writing about myself or my work, and when pressed for autobiographical material can only give a bare chronological outline which contains, naturally, no pertinent facts. I was born in San Francisco in 1919 and spent most of my early life in California. I was married in 1940 to Stanley Edgar Hyman, critic and numismatist, and we live in Vermont, in a quiet rural community with fine scenery and comfortably far away from city life. Our major exports are books and children, both of which we produce in abundance. The children are Laurence, Joanne, Sarah and Barry: my books include three novels, The Road Through The Wall, Hangsaman, The Bird's NestThe Lottery. Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children."

Jackson was herself, a housewife. So where does this side emerge from a typical housewife? Her husband, Stanley Hyman, insisted that "the darker aspects of Jackson's works were not, as some critics claimed, the product of "personal, even neurotic, fantasies," but that Jackson intended, as "a sensitive and faithful anatomy of our times, fitting symbols for our distressing world of the concentration camp and the Bomb," to mirror humanity's Cold War-era fears. Jackson may even have taken pleasure in the subversive impact of her work, as evidenced by Hyman's statement that she "was always proud that the Union of South Africa banned "The Lottery", and she felt that they at least understood the story."

All in all, I think a conversation with Mrs. Jackson would be an interesting one at the very least.

All quotes taken from here.

On Lohafer

The entirety of "The Lottery" revolves around the ending. For this reason I'm not sure that Lohafer's experiment would work very well on Jackson's story because if the story ended at any other place, the plot would make absolutely no sense. From this, what I did find on my test of the story, using Lohafer's experiment, was that the last lot of lines were the only place in the story that I felt there was a fitting enough end to consider it a proper end point to the story. These lines make up the end of the story. What's interesting about them is that they all form this sort of cliffhanger ending, and they all could probably equally end the story with the same effect to the reader.

The children had stones already. And someone gave little Davy Hutchinson few pebbles.
Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her.
A stone hit her on the side of the head.
"It isn't fair, it isn't right," Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

Ultimately, Jackson purposely made the story end on a sharp note. Because of this I think the position of the ending was intentional, and if it were moved it would pull a lot away from the story. Not only does the story lose its entire meaning, but the foreshadowing of the children collecting the rocks loses all sense as well. In most stories which are well designed with plots that interconnect elements and tie up loose ends this could perhaps work. For instance, in "Aunt Lympy's Interferences", the story could possibly end because while the ending is foreshadowed slightly by Victor being outside painting the fence, it still serves some purpose even if he never approaches Melitte.

On Morano

Though in my initial read of Morano's essay I felt that she didn't say much beyond the including of a few techniques used for deciphering fictional stories, I think her assessment of a nonfictional story I feel plays a great deal of importance in reading a story like "The Lottery". Due to its realistic nature, and especially considering the reaction to the story mentioned earlier, the story presents itself as a realistic depiction of suburban life with a twist of mystery. Morano describes what is called the "reality warp" in her essay as an element of fiction. The reality warp is characterized by some contortion of reality, or a shift of our world into the world of the story. "The Lottery" shifts suburban reality into the reality of Jackson's story. Not only did she shift reality, she did it very well, so well that people mistook Jackson's fictional story for a factual representation of the town she came from.

On Flynn

Flynn applies categories of reading to the interactions that students have with text. The most basic of categorizations includes that of a reader that dominates the text, that is one who distances themselves so much from the text because of lack of interest or lack of understanding that they fail to make a concrete connection to the text. However, the converse can also be a problem where the reader becomes so involved in the text that they lack distance to give an objective assessment of the story.

"The Lottery" I felt was an interesting story, and an initially confusing one at that. I feel that the confusing elements of the story make it hard to distance yourself from the text so much that you can't understand what is going on. By making the environment that you're viewing as a reader so obscure that something just doesn't seem right, it sucks you into the story. That isn't to say that I was so emotionally entwined in the story that I couldn't objectively analyze it. This is very obvious in the analyses that were given earlier. I tried to read the story for what it is, while taking different academic angles to perhaps expose something that I hadn't seen before. Searching for themes for instance, was a great way to look for something beyond the words, while character and plot analysis gave more of an examination of the words, searching for foreshadowing perhaps.

I feel that overall, I kept a good distance from the story while still managing to engage myself in its grim atmosphere. Perhaps this was because I got to pick the story, perhaps it was because I was aware of my interaction with the story.

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."