Deeper into The Lottery

September 1, 2016

 In class today we learned how to dig deeper into the story by picking apart a paragraph from the short story, "The Lottery", by Shirley Jackson. To begin our analysis, we first began with Jackson's biography. As a class we picked out two major events that occurred in her lifetime that may have influenced the writing of "The Lottery." Shirley Jackson's adolescent years came during the Great Depression, but also she experienced the horrors of WWII. I believe that the biography of Jackson helped me realize that she lived in a time period where there was no extreme emotion and no one felt remorseful if something was done for the good of the people.

After learning about the different types of analyzes that you can do, the class was then able to look at "The Lottery" a lot closer. As a class, we used Formalism as a way to dig deep into the meaning of a certain paragraph from the story. The closer we looked at the paragraph the more you realized how much emotion took place inside of three sentences.

For fun then, I picked out my own paragraph from "The Lottery" and decided to analyze it using Formalism. I used paragraph 77, beginning with "Tessie Hutchinson...", in the first sentence there were multiple words that had a deeper meaning than just their face value. The phrase "...was in the center of a cleared space by now..." gives you the eerie feeling of the crowd before the drawing, and afterward when Tessie Hutchinson revealed she was holding the black dot. Also the clearing of the area really adds to the scene because you then realize that everyone was there for the show and Mrs. Hutchinson was the main act. Later on in the sentence it says, "...she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her..." I feel like the villagers at this point are in autopilot, Jackson never states that the villagers ever interfere with the process of the lottery, nor did they have any emotion towards Mrs. Hutchinson as she was trying to reach out for their help. The final sentence of the paragraph, "A stone hit her on the side of the head.", is extremely powerful. The sentence made you feel some sort of relief that Mrs. Hutchinson was put out of her misery, but again Jackson states no true emotion from the villagers.

Thanks for reading my analysis of "The Lottery", written by Shirley Jackson.

Madison Mason