The short story "The Lottery," by Shirley Jackson, raises many questions towards the destructive rituals of mankind. Symbolism plays an important role throughout the whole story. The story takes a deeper look at human nature by displaying at least three typical attitudes of man while living and inte...
Irony is "the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect" (Google, Definitions). The Lottery takes place on a warm summer's day in June. There are only 300 people in the village, so the lottery takes only two hours. T...
Towards the end of the story, the narrator shares some thoughts about this matter and says "of course, life is a conspiracy of defeat, a sophisticated joke, endless, and finally establishes that the love between the protagonists is 'a joke after all'." ...
"The Outcasts of Poker Flat" is a masterpiece short story by Francis Bret Harte. The story is drawn with ordinary images, but it contains a lot of hidden feelings and inner thoughts through the characters' actions. John Oakhurst is a gambler who often wins money in playing cards with people in Poker...
Kurt Vonnegut, JR's Unshackled Mind Throughout the given Kurt Vonnegut stories, there has been a common, underlying theme. This theme can be found in such short stories as "Report on the Barnhouse Effect," "The Euphio Question," and "Harrison Bergeron." In extremes of bo...
One night, Cross dug himself a foxhole in darkness while his soldiers laid waste to rations, an endless amount of jokes, and fresh made memories of Ted Lavender dying just not so long ago and how he fell straight down to the ground without any drama just a fall and he was gone, forever (O' Brien 238). ...
And though Irving jokes about the fore-shortening of historical memory he associates with this torrent, he also paints Ichabod as essentially a devourer-a potentially community-destroying force implicitly associated with capitalistic progress. ...
On October 11 2014 (at) 8:00 pm my fiancée, my daughter, and I went to The Roxy Regional Theater in Clarksville, Tennessee to see a performance of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow". This adaptation, directed by Roxy Artistic Director John McDonald, is based on the original book. "The Legend of Sleepy H...
Kurt Vonnegut once said, "Enjoy the little things in life because one day you'll look back and realize they were the big things." It is often that things deemed inessential and trivial become overlooked, getting tossed aside. "Trifles," a one-act play by Susan Glaspell, is a simple story of little...
In Flannery O"Connor's short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find," the gruesome ending comes as quite a shock. But, upon a second read, signs of an ominous end permeate the work. Hints of the family's tragic finale exist hroughout the plot until the time of the first murder. The story contains ...
In Flannery O"Connor's short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find," the gruesome ending comes as quite a shock. But, upon a second read, signs of an ominous end permeate the work. Hints of the family's tragic finale exist throughout the plot until the time of the first murder. The story c...
Making a resolution through majority voting is democratic, but does it mean the result must be correct? The short story The Lottery by Shirley Jackson was published in 1948, three years after ending the World War II. It's like a strong wind triggered a flurry in the society at once. The story is about the people of a small town who hold an annual civil activity - the lottery for the sake of the bumper harvest, and the prize of the winner of the lottery is to be hit until death by stoning. Jackson uses the chronological writing technique with an objective perspective to reveal that the r...
