Ice22+The+lottery

September 25, 2007 Ruby Group

//Attack of the Stones//

It all started on June 27th on a beautiful day in a small New England Village. In the beginning of the short story called “The Lottery”, the author Shirley Jackson makes it sound like this is a nice story about a person who wins money in the lottery. This is not the case. If you have read this before, you would realize that the ending is given away by the fact that they were nervous and collecting stones. If you haven’t read this before, you might get a little hint from this but it might not stand out because little boys tend to play with rocks and dirt. You also might get a hint with all the names like Mr. Graves and the Delacroix which means cross in French. These names and everything else sets a very gloomy and depressing mood. After this the people gathered in the village’s center and were very serious. All the people were serious __except__ for Mr. Summers, one of the important people living in this village. Old Man Warner wasn’t nervous either because he stayed alive for seventy seven years. He thinks that the lottery is great and that people who aren’t doing it are fools. This is a bit weird because they are both very important and they haven’t got the lottery yet. Usually if you were gathering for the lottery you would be excited not nervous so things are getting stranger. In the middle of the story Mr. Summers and Mr. Graves start calling out people’s names and picking the slips of paper from the black box. It says things like “By now, all through the crowd there were men holding the small folded papers in their large hands, turning them over and over nervously.” Even the men are nervous and men are usually not scared of anything so you know that the lottery isn’t a good thing in this town. They opened the slips of paper and people call out, “Who is it?” “Who’s got it?” It’s a bit odd because they didn’t say who won. After this is when the mystery gets solved. Cei-2 As soon as Tessie Hutchinson, “You didn’t give him time enough to take any paper he wanted. I saw you. It wasn’t fair.” Why would you be this upset if you just won a lot of money? The end is the worst part. Afterward the Hutchinson family picked again and Tessie was the one who got the black dot. As her reward she got hit by stones. It’s a really gruesome and disgusting way to die. Even more gruesome than that is the fact that they made her own children hit her with the rocks and that her best friend hit her with a huge stone. This is how Shirley Jackson creates a sense of horror in “The Lottery”.