June 27th starts out with the “warmth of a full-summer day”, yet a brutal murder interrupts this ordinary morning (144). An innocent woman is killed. Her life is stolen in order to satisfy one town’s tradition. Family, friends, and enemies responsible for her death had enough experience with this practice that they “only half listened to the directions” (146). However, as the people anxiously await the end of this annual, ritualistic event known as the lottery, no one expresses a single opinion about the behavior. In the short story “The Lottery” the author Shirley Jackson utilizes several propaganda techniques in order to show that people need to think for themselves.
To begin with, exigency, one of the main techniques of propaganda Jackson uses shows that when people don’t have enough time to think they blindly follow the crowd. From the beginning, the villagers rush the lottery and expect it to last
Jackson uses not only just-plain-folks, but also tradition to underscore the mindless ritualistic nature of this behavior. Nearly every aspect of the villagers’ lives, from the “faded house dresses and sweaters” they wear to their discussions of “planting…rain, tractors and taxes” convey their simplistic lifestyles (145). The lottery, which leads to the horrific crime of murder, seems less appalling due to the fact that ordinary folks commit it simply as a ritual. Because the lottery remains a tradition in the village the people merely participate in and accept the act as an ordinary event. “The children assembled first, of course,” implies that the lottery occurs frequently and the village has developed a systematic way of going about the process (144). Since the villagers view themselves as just-plain-folks, they go along with the tradition as expected in their society without first considering their
Example Essays Home
