The Lottery Shirley Jackson Analysis

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The Lottery Shirley Jackson was a short story writer and novelist; however, she was also a loner and an introvert. Shirley was born on December 14, 1916 in San Francisco, CA. Jackson and her family moved East when she was 17, were she attended Rochester University. After doing a year, she dropped out of school, stayed at home for a year and began practicing on her writing. Jackson entered Syracuse University in 1937, where she met her future husband. Stanley Edgar Hyman, who was at the time also attending Syracuse University, and was an aspiring literary critic. Both Jackson and Hyman graduated in 1940 and moved to New York’s Greenwich Village. According to Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature, “Much of her short fiction and her novels contains a strong element of the fantastic and terrifying.” Short stories like “The Lottery” are filled with a lot of symbolism, irony, characterization, and hidden messages; that is set in place to have the reader intrigued in seeing how the story will end. The Lottery was published in 1948, this short story was about a village that takes part in a horrific ritual, where the townspeople gather in the middle of the town and do a drawing to see who will be selected as the “winner” for the lottery. The downside to this game…show more content…
Tessie Hutchinson, was the unlucky “winner” of the lottery. Tessie was singled out almost from the very beginning. She was in fact, the only one joking around just before the drawing. Sadly, for Tessie no one was joking back with her, which became very ominous. Jackson also inserted some irony in this short story, the title “The Lottery” usually means that one would take part in a drawing to win something for personal gain. Ironically, to win this game means, to lose your
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    parameter for the characters’ lives, actions and behaviours. This can be explained as a character living in a small village might have very different perceptions and points of view compared to a character who lives in a large city. The Lottery, by Shirley Jackson, is set in a bucolic American village with a population of approximately three hundred people. The villagers’ lives are less hectic with most the men’s revolve around agriculture or coal mining while the women’s revolve around household

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