Internal Conflict In The Lottery
How does the author use conflict to develop the characters and the theme?
If you win the lottery, you would expect to become a millionaire. Instead, you got stoned to death. In her contemporary short story, “The Lottery,” the author, Shirley Jackson uses the external conflict of blindly following rituals to demonstrate the danger of the following tradition blindly and the cruel nature of the characters.
To exemplify the first point, I say that the lottery serves as the symbol of conservatism. In the story, the tradition of the lottery is passed down from generation to generation, accepted and faithfully obeyed, regardless of the cruelty or the illogical present in the lottery. For a comparison, “Mr. Summer frequently spoke to the villagers about making a new box, but no one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box. The black box grew shabbier by the year, and in some places faded or stained.” (Shirley …show more content…
To clarify the evidence, crowds are a de-individualize factor. When the townspeople are about to kill Tessie, note how they group into a singular force to commit the aggression, “All right, folks, let’s finish this quickly. Come on, everyone.” (301 to 302). With the drive of crowds, there are three factors to this observation. One, the crowd is anonymous, two, anonymity breed violence, and lastly violence lower penalties. Accordingly, when individuals are placed into groups, they trade off their sense into a collective conscience. Thus they will act differently than as individuals. Markedly there is a contagion in the mob, for there is a wordless peer pressure in their action, which corresponds to increased violence to match the level of the ring leaders. When there is widespread violence, there is a lower sense of legal obligation, because the targets will be the leaders. A fitting metaphor for this is when you are fresh meat, kill, and throw something
If you win the lottery, you would expect to become a millionaire. Instead, you got stoned to death. In her contemporary short story, “The Lottery,” the author, Shirley Jackson uses the external conflict of blindly following rituals to demonstrate the danger of the following tradition blindly and the cruel nature of the characters.
To exemplify the first point, I say that the lottery serves as the symbol of conservatism. In the story, the tradition of the lottery is passed down from generation to generation, accepted and faithfully obeyed, regardless of the cruelty or the illogical present in the lottery. For a comparison, “Mr. Summer frequently spoke to the villagers about making a new box, but no one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box. The black box grew shabbier by the year, and in some places faded or stained.” (Shirley …show more content…
To clarify the evidence, crowds are a de-individualize factor. When the townspeople are about to kill Tessie, note how they group into a singular force to commit the aggression, “All right, folks, let’s finish this quickly. Come on, everyone.” (301 to 302). With the drive of crowds, there are three factors to this observation. One, the crowd is anonymous, two, anonymity breed violence, and lastly violence lower penalties. Accordingly, when individuals are placed into groups, they trade off their sense into a collective conscience. Thus they will act differently than as individuals. Markedly there is a contagion in the mob, for there is a wordless peer pressure in their action, which corresponds to increased violence to match the level of the ring leaders. When there is widespread violence, there is a lower sense of legal obligation, because the targets will be the leaders. A fitting metaphor for this is when you are fresh meat, kill, and throw something