the lottery by shirley jackson characters

A few years after Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ was published, Ray Bradbury wrote a story, ‘ The Flying Machine’, in which a Chinese emperor decides it is better that one man be killed (in order to keep the secret of the flying machine concealed from China’s enemies) than that the man be spared and his invention fall into the wrong hands and a million people be killed in an enemy invasion.īut what makes the lottery in Jackson’s story even more problematic is that there is no evidence that the stoning of one villager does affects the performance of the village crops. There are obviously many parallels with other stories here, as well as various ethical thought experiments in moral philosophy. It’s much better to people like Old Man Warner that one person be chosen at random (so the process is ‘fair’) and sacrificed for the collective health of the community.

People will die if the lottery is not drawn, because the crops will fail and people will starve as a result. To give up the lottery would, in the words of Old Man Warner, be the behaviour of ‘crazy fools’, because he is convinced that the lottery is not only beneficial but essential to the success of the village’s crops. We may scoff at the Carthaginians sacrificing their children to the gods or the Aztecs doing similar, but Jackson’s point is that every age and every culture has its own illogical and even harmful traditions, which are obeyed in the name of ‘tradition’ and in the superstitious belief that they have a beneficial effect.

The lottery by shirley jackson characters