![]() ![]() Tessie, the soon-to-be-victim housewife, may allude to another bucolic Tess (in Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles), whose promising beginnings transformed into gore and death at the hands of men. In retrospect, however, the names of the male lottery organizers-Summer and Graves-provide us with clues to the transition from life to death. The use of names initially seems to bolster the friendliness of the gathering we feel we know these people as, one by one, their names are called in alphabetical order. ![]() The story opens innocently enough, as the townspeople gather for an unidentified annual event connected to the harvest. Readers, lulled into this false summer complacency, begin to feel horror, their moods changing with the narrator’s careful use of evidence and suspense, until the full realization of the appalling ritual murder bursts almost unbearably on them. ![]() A modern horror story, it derives its effect from a reversal of the readers’ expectations, already established by the ordinary setting of a warm June day in a rural community. It may well be the world’s most frequently anthologized short story. Analysis of Shirley Jackson’s The LotteryĪs were many of Shirley Jackson’s stories, “The Lottery” was first published in the New Yorker and, subsequently, as the title story of The Lottery: or, The Adventures of James Harris in 1949. ![]()
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