The Lottery

The Lottery

Introduction

"The Lottery" was published in The New Yorker in 1948, unleashing a wave of controversy and outraged letters to the newspaper. Today I doubt that would do the same effect. We have become accustomed to everything and the reality often exceeds the imagination. The thing is still something unsettling about him after reading this story. Probably because there are questions about the meaning of the act is atrocious that only revealed in the finale. We are looking for symbols, clues in the text that they can interpret it as an allegory. You just have to rely on the words of the author, appeared a month after the publication of the story on the San Francisco Chronicle, in response to readers:

"Explaining just what I Had Hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I Hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their Own Lives. "

Desire to shock, revealing the horror of everyday life, and then I would say that Jackson is able to master. The beginning is alienating for a reader who expects a classic tale of terror, populated by frightening beings and permeated by dark ambience. We find, in fact, in a small rural town America, is a sunny June 27, and children play together because schools are closed. The town square comes alive at the annual lottery, not a single person was at home. Everything seems normal, an event of the country like many others, told with a dry style and realistic (Jackson, 2001). Continuing reading to discover that things is not like that, something is wrong and is also known by the nervousness of the onlookers. In the final pages, after much suspense, here is finally the "turning point that leads straight into a dark alley", to quote Stephen King. 

Discussion

Shirley Jackson wrote in two styles of writing: first, they could describe the lightness and the turmoil of the normal domestic life with disinterested amusement, on the other hand they wrote with cryptic symbolism , a dark horror story of horror literature in the abnormal behavior appeared normal dangerous. In any genre, but she wrote with remarkable firmness and efficiency of the writing style and her choice of words and sentences were in the structure of mood history accurately.

Was all weird and creepy works of The Lottery, which was first published in The New Yorker magazine, the most famous, but also deepest, for the reader. This dark and sinister story that begins with a quiet note describes, the voltage increases, an annual village lottery to a ritual sacrifice to the death by stoning to choose. The tension is particularly in the choice of the name of the woman is too rocky scraps of paper in a black box. The stoning itself is dispassionately cold blood.

The New Yorker Magazine got after the release of hundreds of letters from readers who almost invariably inquired the meaning of the story:

Was the stoning of a parable for institutionalized anger?

Was it an explanation for the cruelty of adaptation?

Was it a statement of the essential baseness ...