Traditions in "A Moment Before the Gun Went Off" and "The Lottery"

Traditions in "A Moment BEfore the Gun Went Off" and "The Lottery"


In the stories "A Moment before The Gun Went Off" and "The Lottery,"
there is the situation in which a group of people cling to traditions very
blindly. In both stories the traditions are so dug into the people's way of life
that questioning them is considered sacrilege within these communities.
Furthermore, the members of the community no longer even remember why the
traditions were set up in the fist place. They follow the traditions simply
because their predecessors followed the traditions. Another similarity between
the communities in both stories is, even though these traditions are firmly
entrenched in these communities, they are rapidly losing there grip in other
communities. This detail is not only mentioned in both stories, but looked down
upon by communities that still follow the traditions.
In the story "The Lottery," the tradition is to hold a lottery on a
specific summer day, but instead of winning a cash prize or some other good
thing, the winner gets to be stoned to death by the members of the community.
The character that is mentioned most in this story is one by the name of Mrs.
Hutchinson. Mrs. Hutchinson is a devoted mother and housewife. She is the one
who eventually gets singled out to win the lottery. So it is Mrs. Hutchinson who
is impacted the most brutally by the lottery. However the other people of the
village are affected differently by the lottery. It is very unlikely that the
people of the village kill people for the sake of killing people. More likely
there is a deeper reason. One possibility is that the people of this village of
this village are looking for a scapegoat. A person to take the blame for
mistakes and sins of others, so one person dies for a community and saves the
community from whatever sins that had been committed.
The society can be affected in many ways by the lottery. Other neighbor
societies have been affected by the lottery, many have abandoned... [continues]

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