Setting in the Lottery
We basically grew up with them. When I say them I am speaking of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, our neighbors. They lived in one of the nicest homes our neighborhood had to offer and my parents loved to pass the night hours playing cards in the Smith's smoke filled kitchen. The white picket fence, the luxury cars that lined their driveway, to their proper acting children who my parents tried to mold me into, the Smith's seemed to have it all. The loud screeching sounds of sirens awoke me one warm summer night. It was as if perfection crumbled right before my eyes as I peeked through my moonlit window. My father stood on the sidewalk comforting my mother as a body draped under a white sheet lied in a stretcher passing a handcuffed Mr. Smith. Like the Smith's did in their everyday life Shirley Jackson uses settings to trick our minds. In her story "the lottery", Jackson uses setting to familiarize us, confuse us, and to ultimately shock us. A town with "flowers blooming profusely. Grass richly green." (Jackson, 245 paragraph 1) "Kids breaking into boisterous play. Men speaking of planting and taxes. Women greeting one another exchanging bits of gossip" (Jackson, 245 paragraph 3)
There is a dot on one piece of paper which will determine the winner of the lottery. What is, however, is the cleverness of the settings the author decides to use. He serves his most important role in his dictation of the lottery. One man is described as he approaches the box as grinning "nervously" as he grabbed his choice of paper from the box. The author brings about in the reader familiar stereotypes of the perfect small American town, and, ostensibly, the perfect American people who inhabit such places. Hutchinson's family is now asked to draw papers again out of the box. A reader may find his businesslike attitude toward his task to be familiar and controversial to the grotesque nature of "The Lottery" itself. Confusion in the setting begins when the black box is revealed. A winner of the lottery is finally established. "You didn't give him time enough to take the paper he wanted. " (ref)? The story takes on a more mysterious and suspenseful aura as the reader realizes that this "Lottery" is in fact not the desirable situation one would expect.
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Acceptance Essays
