I believe that "The Lottery" is a horror story. Shirley Jackson depicts a
small town village that in a blink of an eye will turn on one of their own.
This story starts out nice and serene. Jackson tells of a beautiful sunny,
summer day. The children are off school for the summer, and everybody is
gathering in the village square. Nothing really seems out of the ordinary there.
However, Jackson adds little components to the story that start to give it a
The first thing that Jackson introduces is a rather large pile of stones that
the children are collecting. This seems to be a little bit strange. Why is the
whole village gathering in the square and these children are gathering rocks?
This is the first moment that Jackson makes the reader start to wonder what
Next Jackson starts to explain the whole lottery process and the key
characters who are involved. It seems that at first there is a calmness about the
crowd. However, little by little Jackson reveals that the crowd is actually quite
nervous. For example in paragraph nineteen the crowd goes completly silent
before Mr. Summers reads off the first of the names to come pick out of the
black box. Also in paragraph twenty-seven all the men are flipping their pieces of
paper over and over again in nervous anticipation.
Jackson also tells little pieces of the lottery's history. She explains how
the lottery used to be a respected ritual. It used to be a long drawn out
ceremony, and now it has been reduced to a mere two hour bother. It seems like
year after year the village becomes more efficient in running the lottery, and with
that efficiency the crowd becomes more desensitized to the fact that someone is
going to die. They all seem to have accepted the fact that they all will have to
help in the process of killing one of t
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