Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery is a story of a small town whose citizens are required to participate in a yearly “lottery”. The reader soon finds, however, that unlike most lotteries this is not a lottery that one hopes to win. Although we do not find out what the prize of the lottery is until the ...
In Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” there is a constant struggle for the characters to make the ritual murder of a member of their town a familiar act, one which they can disconnect themselves and their feelings from while justifying murder for the common good of the village. This process of distancing themselves not only tries ...
A society is formed when a group of people come together and share certain interests and ideas. In such interactions, the good and the bad among each individual are influenced, and the society more or less tends to think in a specific way. The society begins to think of certain ideas as good and evil, ...
There has been very few critical attention paid to North-American writer Shirley Jackson. The first book-length study on her life and works was published long ten years after her death, in 1975. It is Lenemaja Friedman’s Shirley Jackson, a still important and useful work despite the fact it does not mention witchcraft nor anything related ...
Since its first appearance in The New Yorker on June 28, 1948, Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery,” has become somewhat of a literary phenomenon. Over the years, the story has been “anthologized, dramatized, televised, and even [. . .] made into a ballet” (“On the Morning” 227). Much of the story’s popularity is owed ...
From the beginning as the children pile onto the boulder-like rocks, something is amiss. The short story by Shirley Jackson is disturbing and proof that hiddeninside every human, no matter how virtuous we may seem, lives a bloodthirsty killer. The story opens with a beautiful blue sky where “flowers are blossoming profusely and the grass ...
