"The Lottery", is a short story by Shirley Jackson and is not the casual lottery that you would expect. And even though that the lottery is purely evil, the villagers do not want to lose it because it's a tradition among them. In the first paragraph I will talk about the plot of the story. In the second paragraph, I will talk about the foreshadowing and finally, in the third paragraph, I will talk about the symbolism.
The story is about a lottery, which is evident because of the title "The Lottery" but it's not the kind of lottery that you would participate. The story takes place on the 27th of June, in the morning, in a small village in New England. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o'clock. The lottery, in other villages took two days and started on the 26th of June, but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours. The children were picking up stones and gathering them for the lottery (foreshadowing). Later on, when everything is setup, every person had to pick a paper from "the black box" (foreshadowing), even the children. All along, it seems that noone wanted to be the winner of the lottery. And at the end we realize that the winner who picked the "lucky" paper from the black box would get stoned. It was a woman named Mrs. Hutchinson who got stoned by her fellow comrades and family members. This relates to the theme because we can see that the friends and family members do not care for each other when it comes to this lottery, and their mind is taken by evilness.
The end of the short story "The Lottery" was unexpected, but it was possible to predict the end because the author had left some foreshadowing. The first hint that lets us see that something is not right is when the boys started picking up rocks. It states in the text that: "Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones; Bobby and Harry Jones and Dickie Delacroix [.
