5.08 Free Choice Blog
For this free choice assignment, I read "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson. My brother suggested I read it after asking him what his college assignment on it was about.
In The Lottery, everyone in a town is supposed to report to the town square at 10am. It talks about children and people in the community gathering stones and placing them all in a pile. Slowly but surely, all the town's people report to the lottery and sign in. After the lottery starts, each family comes up and each member selects a small piece of paper. They are told not to open or look at their pieces of paper until everyone draws. There is discussion in the crowd about how other towns have stopped doing the lottery.
After everyone gets their paper, they are told to open it and word gets around that one man has "it." His family argues that he didn't have enough time to choose his paper, so they redraw them, and a women named Tessie ends up with "it." She protests but the town is told to just "get on with it" and she is then stoned to death.
I was very surprised by the end of the story, because the lottery is typically when you win a good thing. I think the author's intent was to show that just because things have happened for a long time, doesn't mean they are OK or good to do. The town had been doing the lottery for a long time so they just all accepted it and moved on. The organizational pattern was mainly chronological, since it was in order of when things happened.
In The Lottery, everyone in a town is supposed to report to the town square at 10am. It talks about children and people in the community gathering stones and placing them all in a pile. Slowly but surely, all the town's people report to the lottery and sign in. After the lottery starts, each family comes up and each member selects a small piece of paper. They are told not to open or look at their pieces of paper until everyone draws. There is discussion in the crowd about how other towns have stopped doing the lottery.
After everyone gets their paper, they are told to open it and word gets around that one man has "it." His family argues that he didn't have enough time to choose his paper, so they redraw them, and a women named Tessie ends up with "it." She protests but the town is told to just "get on with it" and she is then stoned to death.
I was very surprised by the end of the story, because the lottery is typically when you win a good thing. I think the author's intent was to show that just because things have happened for a long time, doesn't mean they are OK or good to do. The town had been doing the lottery for a long time so they just all accepted it and moved on. The organizational pattern was mainly chronological, since it was in order of when things happened.
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