For this article of the week I read a famous short story called "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson. The short story is about a town in the context of a time period that is fiction but placed in the distant past (maybe present, it is questionable), that hosts an event each year called The Lottery.
The event takes place in the midst of June where every person in the town gathers around to draw slips of paper from a black box. The papers are all blank except for only one that has a black dot. Within the first round, whoever draws the black dot now has to move on the second round where that person and their immediate family have to draw again. This time when they draw a slip of paper the person who gets the black dot is then stoned to death by the rest of the town. The creepy part is that it is a ritual and no one thinks anything of it... family and friends kill their loved ones because it is a tradition. The history behind this is that the person killed is a sacrifice for a good crop season.
In some ways this connects to other parts of the world in the ancient civilizations... some tribes of people who have human sacrifice for their goods or to promote good weather or health. In this case it is a civilized town that does this through a lottery and apparently (it is implied) every other town does this as well.
There are many different interpretations as for the purpose for this short story. The author's intention could be among a plethora of ideas. However, the way I interpreted the story was that the author was trying to convey modern society and how in some ways we are just as corrupt. Although society today does not do go around killing people in order to give up sacrifice, we have laws and proper authority and civility but it might be a parallel to other things in society that have become a prominent issue. Otherwise it might have been just a pure imaginative story worthy of writing down. The main target audience would be anyone in the general public.
From a rhetorical standpoint, a device used most evidently was suspense. This is because from the very beginning it starts out with misleading cliffhanger adjectives that make you think of spring time, and a quant little town that is quite calm and peaceful. The discussion of the lottery is not filled with hatred or bewilderment yet it is described objectively making the reader guess for the entire story what exactly is the main point of this lottery. It is only in the end that it is revealed the lottery is actually a quite nefarious event that results in the murderous death of a citizen, and even then all is not revealed. It ends with someone being stoned to death with no follow up events. The final lines are, "...and then they were upon her." This is referring to the people all gathering around Mrs. Hutchinson which was the woman who "won" the lottery.
In this way juxtaposition is also used because the word lottery is usually associated with money, or something beneficial to the winner that results in the overwhelming feeling of felicity, but in this case something so special does not occur and the lottery is associate with death. These two elements posing next to each other is an example of juxtaposition through written rhetoric.
After reading this story (a few times) I was still astonished by the ending. The first time through I literally had chills from how gruesome and blunt the story really was. The author almost tricks readers into thinking the story will be calm, kind, simple, possible and most likely happy... That is until Mrs. Hutchinson begins to sound frightened and scared to go through with the lottery when she realizes her family has "won" and is moving on to the next level. But by that point in the story I was completely confused and trying to understand what was going on. I was thoroughly misunderstanding what was going on from the very beginning. The lottery was not really a prized lottery at all, rather it was a picking for the next sacrifice.
- Ali Mason
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