Stones create echoes: Shirly Jackson’s “The Lottery”
Voices of the past carry on through literature. Time erodes the body and mind of all who have graced this planet, but the words of immortal prose stay to guide and console those left to carry on Mankind’s greatest endeavors. Many works have surfaced and have been buried, only to resurface again: usually with truth building like equity, as the human race completes its cycles of historic repetition. It is of one of these great truth-bearing stories that this work (whose words you hold now) pertains. By simplifying the social dynamic and illustrating the relationships between various forms of power in society, Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” parallels current events in our modern capitalistic age. A.M. Homes states that, “Jackson works with precision; she sees things as if she's zoomed in and has got life under a magnifying glass. And it's not just any glass, but one with a curved owlish lens, so that perhaps we see and know a little more than usual. Her authorial voice is as idiosyncratic and individual as a fingerprint, and has the ring of God's honest truth (A.M. Homes).”
War, famine, the media, and corporate greed are all injustices that we are not a stranger to. It is important to realize that these problems have existed since the beginning of man’s assent over the natural world. By discovering the history of a problem, the observers of such a truth can put the proper amount of urgency behind it. And change can at last prevail.
The story opens on a clear and sunny summer day in a small New England village. The village is host to about three hundred souls. On the surface this story contrasts modern lifestyles against an old pagan-like ritual that even the children participate in. After two rounds of drawing slips of paper, a “winner” is determined and stoned to death by everyone in the town. When approached in this simplistic manner it is no wonder why Jackson and the New Yorker (which published the work... [continues]
Voices of the past carry on through literature. Time erodes the body and mind of all who have graced this planet, but the words of immortal prose stay to guide and console those left to carry on Mankind’s greatest endeavors. Many works have surfaced and have been buried, only to resurface again: usually with truth building like equity, as the human race completes its cycles of historic repetition. It is of one of these great truth-bearing stories that this work (whose words you hold now) pertains. By simplifying the social dynamic and illustrating the relationships between various forms of power in society, Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” parallels current events in our modern capitalistic age. A.M. Homes states that, “Jackson works with precision; she sees things as if she's zoomed in and has got life under a magnifying glass. And it's not just any glass, but one with a curved owlish lens, so that perhaps we see and know a little more than usual. Her authorial voice is as idiosyncratic and individual as a fingerprint, and has the ring of God's honest truth (A.M. Homes).”
War, famine, the media, and corporate greed are all injustices that we are not a stranger to. It is important to realize that these problems have existed since the beginning of man’s assent over the natural world. By discovering the history of a problem, the observers of such a truth can put the proper amount of urgency behind it. And change can at last prevail.
The story opens on a clear and sunny summer day in a small New England village. The village is host to about three hundred souls. On the surface this story contrasts modern lifestyles against an old pagan-like ritual that even the children participate in. After two rounds of drawing slips of paper, a “winner” is determined and stoned to death by everyone in the town. When approached in this simplistic manner it is no wonder why Jackson and the New Yorker (which published the work... [continues]
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