Jackson deliberately wrote the entire story so as not to give a way the event that is going to take place in the end. The story begins with “The morning of June 27 was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a fall-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green”(Jackson). The first time anyone reads the story, they just expect that the lottery winner is going to actually win a prize. No one suspects that the winning will be sacrificed.

The description of the villagers assembling is also told without any evidence of the gathering being for something evil. The children come first, and although they are collecting stone, it is not clear that are going to throw those stones at the

“It is Tessie Hutchinson’s reaction to her family being selected that finally lets the reader know that something significant is about to happen”(Kosenko). Tessie begins to argue about the selection process. “Suddenly, Tessie Hutchinson shouted to Mr. Summers. “You didn’t give him time enough to take any paper he wanted. I saw you. It wasn’t fair”(Jackson)! No one pays any attention to that argument, because it is pointed out that he had the same chance as the rest of the people.

Once the reader starts to realize more of what is going on, they start to become uneasy. Some sort of ritual is involved, and it is a ritual that is obviously taken very seriously by the villagers, even though some are reluctant to be involved. “The villagers kept their distance, leaving a space between themselves and the stool, and when Mr. Summers said, ‘Some of you fellows want to give me a hand?’ there was a hesitation before two men… came forward to hold the box steady on the stool while Mr. Summers stirred up the papers inside it”(Jackson). “This hint of trouble is carefully countered by the way that Jackson describes the next set of events. Even the box that holds the papers, so old that it was made from pieces of the original box from the very start of the lottery, and is not given any special position in the village after the lottery is over ”(Griffin). “The rest of the year, the box was put away, sometimes one place, sometimes another; it had spent one year in Mr. Graves’s barn and sometimes it was set on a shelf in the Martin grocery and left there”(Jackson).

Some topics in this essay:
Jackson Jackson, Shirley Jackson, Tessie Hutchinson, Peter Kosenko, Tessie Hutchinson’s, story begins, jackson describes, short story, story reader, town normal, tessie hutchinson, stool summers, reads story,