Literary Analysis Of The Lottery By Shirley Jackson

“The Lottery”, by Shirley Jackson is a very suspenseful, yet very shocking short story. This story is set in a small village, on a hot summers day in June. Flowers are blooming, and the towns people are gathering for the lottery, which is a tradition the town does every year. As the reader reads the first paragraph they think this is a happy story. The title also says, “The Lottery” which is a word often used for winning something or receiving a prize. It’s a beautiful summer day and everything seems perfect, but as the reader keeps reading they come to realize that this story is not as simple and straight forward as the title suggest, rather it is a horrifying and dark tale. Shirley Jackson is forwarding the theme on tragic it can be to blindly follow traditions by using foreshowing, symbolism, and dialog. The first literary device Shirley Jackson uses to forward the theme blindly following traditions, is foreshowing. The first example I am going to us I talked about in my introduction. Jackson talks about how perfect the day was. Jackson states, “The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summers day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green” (255). This is foreshowing a perfect day, but really, it’s not. It’s a tragic, sad day which we will soon come to find out. Another example would be when Jackson talks about how the kids start to pick out the best rocks. Jackson writes, “Bobby Martin had already stuffed