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) Are examples of how the author uses the tool of setting to give this small town a familiarity and sense of comfort. This sense is easily breached as the reader learns that the purpose of "The Lottery" is far more ominous than the setting would suggest. 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. It is this familiar setting which allows us to identify with the story's characters. The gathering for the lottery allows the observer to at least identify with familiar surroundings of comfort and wholesome banter as husbands a
             ...

More Essays:

APA     MLA     Chicago
Setting in the Lottery. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 16:15, March 28, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/184.html