The Lottery

             Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her."" In Shirley Jackson's unusual short story, a pivotal character shouts this as the small village she lived in all her life, and raised her own family, is showered in a death storm of stones. Shirley made her story, "The Lottery- in order to show society how wrong it is to blindly follow a tradition or idea without realizing its purpose, and the brutality that can become of it. In the world today people do things in their daily routine without question, they solute the flag, stand for the national anthem, and continue to teach these ways to their posterity without asking why it is done or the meaning of what they are doing. Shirley Jackson uses her story to prove that tradition over powers a person's sense of common or moral sense of decency through the ritual of the lottery in ways such as the value of tradition in the town, the feelings/attitude of the town's people, and the actions of the characters.
             In the small nameless village the very first settlers that established it had started the inhumane and savage process of the lottery, and the three hundred current inhabitants of the village still keep every part of the tradition they can even if some of it is a hassle and does not make sense. "The Black box now resting on the stool had been put into use even before Old Man Warner, the oldest man in town, was born."" The townspeople refuse to get a new black box to hold the lottery out of even though the original one is falling apart because they do not want to disturb or change the process of the ancient lottery. There were set rules of which the lottery was conducted. "There was a great deal of fussing to be done before Mr. Summers declared the lottery open. There were the lists t make up "of heads of families, heads of households in each family, members of each household in each family."" The people of the town were so set on these rules even though they were all such a hassle.