The Lottery Essay, Research Paper

The Lottery

This story reveals how selfish people can be in the society. In “The Lottery” villagers are an isolated group of individuals who could careless about one another, even their own family members. Although the author doesn’t explain why this village is completely separated from the rest of the world, the story truly reflects our society, that people ignore bad events happening around the world, as long those bad events do not happen to them.

In this story no one cares to object that the lottery is a bad tradition that should be terminated as a tradition. Mrs. Hutchinson doesn’t care about it either until she won the ticket. Suddenly she becomes frantic and wonders why people are doing such thing. She then cries out several times for a re-draw, but people ignore and start to pick up rocks to throw onto her. Her friend Mrs. Delacroix picks up a stone as well, even her own son is given a rock to throw at his own mother. Her husband doesn’t object to stop it. People are just happy that it is not them who are picked, and wonder if this year would be their last year.

A good comparison to our society is: In 1943 when the news of Nazi concentration camps killing Jewish reached America, most Americans responded with horror and wondered how the people in Germany could have stood there, kept silent and allow Hitler’s military power to kill innocent people. In “The Lottery,” people just sit back and not questioning or stopping the lottery. When there are people disagree to the lottery, they just mumble their displeasure under their breath because they are afraid to speak out, this is the same to the German people who were afraid to speak out about the killing of Jewish, perhaps they didn’t want to get into trouble.

The story shows that people can just close eyes and ignore many things that happen around us. This is a good story that reveals the weakness in our society, and we should think about it thoroughly.