Friday, Oct. 15, 2004 - 8:09 p.m.

I'm back with another work assignment to post, this time it's not a business letter, but a story review. *sigh* I hate writing these, but if you love reading them or like to critisize my bad work, then stay tuned these next two days because I'm gonna have to be writing a whole lot. Yup. Sucks, I know. Well, at least I can have fun doing this, if not only a little. Writing in an online diary makes English homework seem less like a chore, and something more for fun. It's not that I think English is a bad subject, it's that I hate homework in general.
Okay, enough rambling. Here's the review of 'The Lottery'.

English Portfolio- Review of ‘The Lottery’

The Lottery, written by Shirley Jackson was first published in the New York Times. The short story captured many readers' attention and many non-readers' as well. The reason this story held people’s attention for such a long period of time was because of its amazingly shocking ending, one nobody expected.
The author first starts off with the villagers assembling in the town square for what seems to be a lottery. The children are happily gathering stones and pebbles while playing with each other. A man called Mr. Summers then arrives with a black box, which was for holding little folded slips of paper with families' names on them. After a while, the lottery is declared open. Mr. Summers announces the name of each family one by one, handing the head of each family their slip of paper. The family that has the slip of paper with a black dot on it is handed slips for each individual member of the family. The person with the black dot on their sheet officially wins the lottery. But, the question is what you win.
This story sounds simple enough, but really is not. Shirley Jackson describes in very deep thought how tradition can affects man's actions and uses this fact to insert it into the story. But she does it in a way that it is very hard to spot the true meaning and almost too easy to misunderstand. There are a lot of hints throughout the text though. Mr. Summers was thinking about building another box to hold the lottery tickets but the villagers, especially Old Man Warner who has attended the annual lottery for almost seventy-five years, opposes the idea immediately. This shows that once something is started, it is hard to stop. People started the lottery a long time ago in that same village, and it has become a tradition ever since. Nobody wants to change tradition.

However, Shirley Jackson does show us that parts of the tradition can be forgotten or lost. In the story, it was said that before that there were several rituals accompanied with performing the lottery. But there was no ritual present in the story. In general, this fiction was a pleasure to read. Not only did the author give a full impact of surprise at the end, but she also made me reflect on some of the points in the story. That, along with some taste of what people living in suburban areas were like made the story very entertaining.

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