"The Lottery" begins as a happy story. The sun is out, it's morning and the whole town is gathering up for their regular tradition, the lottery. Shirley Jackson gets the readers all comfortable for a nice story to read. Jackson gives the readers the image that this town is just a regular ordinary peaceful town with the men talking about "tractors and taxes"(Jackson, 84) and the kids all running around having fun, gathering stones. The one thing the readers don't expect is that the story flip flops and turns into a story full of irony, foreshadowing, tradition and evil. As the story comes to an end "The Lottery" talks about Mrs. Hutchinson, who is married and has kids, winning the lottery. Once everybody finds out she is the winner everybody loses their sense of nature and they move on to pick up stones and start the stoning. Jackson is trying to tell the readers that as a society we are reluctant to reject outdated traditions, ideas, rules and practices.
             The black box is one of the major key symbols in understanding the outdated traditions in the story. Once the black box was introduced in the story it was like the whole crowd got silent, and the atmosphere dramatically changed. The town has a fear in a tradition they can control an example of this is "The black box grew shabbier each year; by now it was no longer completely black, but splintered badly along one side to show the original wood color, and in some places faded or stained."(84) The box is all beat up, but people still refuse to make a new one in fear of upsetting the tradition. The people in the town didn't even understand the tradition. Even when Mr. Graves first brought in the black box he asked "Some of you fellows want to give me a hand"(84) and then the two men hesitated like they were scared to even come close to the box. Shirley Jackson wanted to show how blind as people we can be. She
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