Study Questions

"The number of people who expected Mrs. Hutchinson to win a Bendix washer would amaze you." -- Shirley Jackson: "The Lottery"

1. What is the lottery for?  (Hint: "Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon," says Old Man Warner.)  What are the community's  attitudes toward tradition?
2. Can you try to divide the story into three parts: the beginning, the middle and the end?  How does each part function?  Does the ending of the story surprise you a lot?  Does the story provide clues (or foreshadowing) for the ending?
3. What do you know about the characters?  Is there any significance in the choice of their names?
4. From what point-of-view does the narrator tell the story?  When, or in which year, does the story take place?  Can we tell whether it is in the present, or in the past?  Is the village a real one?  What is the point of using an ancient rite as the subject matter of a modern story?

• " Monstrous acts and little murders"; An Article by JONATHAN LETHEM about how a new collection of unpublished stories betrays the two faces of Shirley Jackson.  "Likely the most controversial piece of fiction ever published in the New Yorker,  resulting in hundreds of canceled subscriptions, later adapted for television, radio and ballet, ["The Lottery] now resides in the popular imagination as an archetype" (p. 1; more on p. 2).   What kind of "archetype" does the story create?  LETHEM claims that the village is a real one (North Bennington, a tiny village less than a mile from the otherwise isolated Bennington  campus in Vermont). " the two faces" of Shirley Jackson":
  
  

  "One was a  turgid, fearful ugly-duckling, permanently cowed by the severity of her upbringing by a  suburban mother obsessed with appearances. This half of Jackson was a character she brought   brilliantly to life in her stories and novels from the beginning: the shy girl, whose identity slips all too easily from its foundations. The other half of Jackson was the  expulsive iconoclast, brought out of her shell by marriage to Hyman--himself a garrulous egoist very much in the tradition of Jewish  50's New York intellectuals and by the visceral shock of   mothering a quartet of noisy, demanding babies. This second  Shirley Jackson dedicated herself to rejecting her mother's sense of propriety, drank and smoked and fed to buttery excess--directly toblame for her and her husband's  early deaths--dabbled in magic and voodoo, and interfered loudly when she thought the provincial Vermont schools were doing an injustice to her talented children.  This was the Shirley Jackson that  the town feared, resented and, depending on whose version you  believe, occasionally persecuted. ..."(p. 1; more on p. 2)

• Do you know any other stories about scapegoat?  In Taiwanese society?  Politics?  In what ways is brutal violence committed by our society to an individual?