The story begins with young children gathering in the town square. They are laughing, playing, and generally having fun doing things that children do. Some of the children are gathering stones from the surrounding are and forming a mound of them together. Soon the men and women arrive, bringing with them a less jovial tone. The villagers make small talk laughing quietly amongst one another while at the same time maintaining a slight seriousness. Jackson makes some use of foreshadowing early in the story by mentioning the pile of stones and the way the older chara

cters distance themselves from it. “They stood together, away from the pile of stones in the corner, and their jokes were quiet and they smiled rather than laughed” (1). The observant reader is able to sense that something is not quite right about the atmosphere. These suspicions are confirmed come the end of the story when the reader learns that this gathering is part of a sick and twisted ritual in which members of the village draw paper slips from a box to select one member of the village. This person is then used as a scapegoat and is stoned to death to ensure a happy and profitable year for the village.

Old Man Warner snorted. “Pack of crazy fools,” he said. “Listening to the young folks, nothing’s ever good enough for them. Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work anymore, live that way for a while. Used to be a saying about lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.’ First thing you know, we’d all be eating stewed chickenweed and acorns. There’s always been a lottery,” he added petulantly. “Bad enough to see young Joe Summers up there joking with everybody.”

Although this exact custom does not take place today, it is a symbol for similar a

Some topics in this essay:
Shirley Jackson, Joe Summers, Shirley Jakson's, , “the lottery”, children gathering, pile stones, society tradition,