Symbolism in Jackson’s The Lottery
In The Lottery, Shirley Jackson sets up a story where the writing style is like no other. Instead of foreshadowing and describing every detail vividly, Jackson tells everything through symbolism. There is no rhyme or reason for a stoning of an innocent woman, but through the symbolism one might imagine certain reasons for everything, such as the characters in the story. This symbolism leads the reader into thinking about all of the things that were not specified in the story itself. The first thing that came to my mind was the second paragraph which states: The children assembled first, of course. School was recently over for the summer, and the feeling of liberty sat uneasily on most of them... One might wonder how it seems to the reader that the children were anxious about the lottery, and they knew that something bad was going to happen. At this point, the reader does not know what the lottery is, or why the children were anxious, but it is clear that they were not ready to fully celebrate the “lifting off of the chest” of the burden of school.
In the fourth paragraph, Jackson uses a symbolism that is most important to the story, the “black box”. This is the box from which they draw the names of the villagers to see which one will “win”, but we the reader don’t know what will happen. The box is described more than any other object in the story. Jackson describes it as “faded…stained…growing shabbier each year”. The reason that this box is so crucial to the lottery is that it represents one of two things, A): the tradition of the lottery itself. The lottery is, what most people would think, a primitive and highly unnecessary waste of human life, in the end, the person whose name that is drawn gets stoned to death. There is no reason for such violence at any point in the story, but Jackson keeps reiterating the tradition of it all with such characters as “old man Warner” whose name itself “Warner” is a symbolism...