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Our Short Story Read for March 2017 is The Lottery by Shirley Jackson, published 1948, 30 pages

I read this last summer and it spooked me out. Looking forward to discussing.

I read this many years ago in school and have been haunted by it since. I will not be rereading it with the group.

Glad to see I was not the only one spooked by it.

There are only two things (movie/book related) that have truly haunted me over the years - the Exorcist movie and this book. I just don't need to re-inflict those feelings on myself... again. I guess I would call it - once bitten, twice shy.

I just finished reading this last week. I didn't think it was scary, at all. Actually, I thought it was pretty tame and frankly, quite silly. :)

I've read it before. Don't remember being particularly freaked out by it, personally. I'll read it again and see.

Loretta wrote: "I just finished reading this last week. I didnt think it was scary, at all. Actually, I thought it was pretty tame and frankly, quite silly. :)"

I didn't find it scary either. I use the word haunting because of the story line and how utterly ironic and horrifying I found it to be. Perhaps it was my age (I was in high school at the time... eons ago) but I still to this day experience kind of terrifying feeling when I remember it. Maybe I'm just a big baby. ;-)

Bat-Cat wrote: "Loretta wrote: "I just finished reading this last week. I didnt think it was scary, at all. Actually, I thought it was pretty tame and frankly, quite silly. :)"

I didn't find it scary either. I us..."

Not at all Bat-Cat! I didn't mean to imply that. It's just my opinion of the book.

Loretta wrote: "Bat-Cat wrote: "Loretta wrote: "I just finished reading this last week. I didnt think it was scary, at all. Actually, I thought it was pretty tame and frankly, quite silly. :)"

I didn't find it sc..."

I didn't take offense at all, Loretta!!! I was just thinking that maybe at that time of my life (did I mention that it was eons ago?) I was more sensitive to those kinds of themes. I still can't even think of The Exorcist without a PTSD sort of reaction.

Amazingly I went through High School, College, and Grad School without reading this. Just read it and have to say it did send a shiver up the spine.

Bat-Cat wrote: "Loretta wrote: "Bat-Cat wrote: "Loretta wrote: "I just finished reading this last week. I didnt think it was scary, at all. Actually, I thought it was pretty tame and frankly, quite silly. :)"

I d..."

Eons! Right! :). I know what you mean though. I still have that same knee jerk when I think about The Shining by Stephen King or The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris! :)

Loretta wrote: "Bat-Cat wrote: "Loretta wrote: "Bat-Cat wrote: "Loretta wrote: "I just finished reading this last week. I didnt think it was scary, at all. Actually, I thought it was pretty tame and frankly, quite..."

Oh, I could never be so brave to tackle those!!!

With The Lottery I experience a similar feeling, although in no way as severe as with The Exorcist. The ending is just so horrifying to me that people can be so.... you get the picture. But, at least I don't get nightmares about it anymore. ;-)

Age and experience might play a part.

I didn't read this until I was older and by then I'd already read or seen several books and shows that obviously took part of their plot from Jackson's book, so it didn't make that much of an impact.

I do still own a Jackson anthology, so I might re-read and see what I think now.

/review/show...

This is my review. The Lottery changed my young life, you guys!

Great review Paula. I've read this one several times -- to me even knowing the ending it is worth the reread. Not scary, but to me it is creepy.

Kathy wrote: "Great review Paula. I've read this one several times -- to me even knowing the ending it is worth the reread. Not scary, but to me it is creepy."

Yea, I'll give you that, creepy! :)

I have a runaway imagination and get creeped out very easily so of course I'd get creeped out by this.

I came across this piece in the New Yorker (where The Lottery was first published) about the response they got from readers back in 1948 about Jackson's story. Thought you might find it interesting too!

I've been meaning to read this ever since I read an article about Jackson in the New York Review of Books a couple of months ago. She had a pretty ghastly life, and I very much admire her ability to write through it all. Still, this story isn't the kind of thing I love, though I'm glad to have finally read it.

Sarah wrote: "I came across this piece in the New Yorker (where The Lottery was first published) about the response they got from readers back in 1948 about Jackson's story. Thought you might find..."

That is a really good article! Thank you Sarah.

Sarah wrote: "I came across this piece in the New Yorker (where The Lottery was first published) about the response they got from readers back in 1948 about Jackson's story. Thought you might find..."

Harsh story indeed! Thanks for posting this Sarah! :)

I guess I really didn't like this story. My review: /review/show....

I almost wanted to say this is like the forerunner of dystopian fiction but I'm now starting to think of others around the same publication date that can fit into that as well.

Sarah wrote: "I came across this piece in the New Yorker (where The Lottery was first published) about the response they got from readers back in 1948 about Jackson's story. Thought you might find..."

Thank you for sharing the link Sarah. It is interesting that a short story could cause such a strong reaction when it was published.

Maybe it was significant that this story was written shortly after the second world war, the victims of the holocaust and Hiroshima could maybe be seen as random victims scapegoats as in the lottery.

From others comments it seems that in the USA this story is often read as part of the school curriculum, coming from the UK this is the first time I have read the story.

When reading the story it reminded me a little of Holman Hunts painting 'The Scapegoat' based on the biblical story when a goat is sacrificed to atone for the communities sins

Karen wrote: "Sarah wrote: "I came across this piece in the New Yorker (where The Lottery was first published) about the response they got from readers back in 1948 about Jackson's story. Thought ..."

I find that interesting too, Karen--that is, thinking about the historical context and how it may have influenced Jackson. I wonder what it was that inspired her to write this story and delve into the themes she did.

Karen wrote: "From others comments it seems that in the USA this story is often read as part of the school curriculum, coming from the UK this is the first time I have read the story.

When reading the story it ..."

I read the story a few days ago, and had completely forgotten I'd read for school until I got all the way through it. I'm in the U.S. and read it in junior high (8th grade, I think?) in the mid 90s, but I don't know how commonly read it is in schools here.

Something that sets this apart from many of those I've read/seen with a similar theme is how completely senseless it is...

Often writers make it seem that society will benefit in some way.

Sometimes it's some sort of depopulation effort so limited resources will go further.
Sometimes, they say that a person is just so immoral/evil that society would be better off without them and their influence.
Sometimes it's an outside force that they're sacrificing a person to to maintain the status quo.

Or, there's either an attempt to make someone "the other" - an outsider that they can blame all of society's problems on so that they can pretend that removing that outsider also removes those ills.


There's none of that in this story.



Their only justification for it is tradition. There's no benefit to them - it's actually to their detriment. No one's forcing them to hold this annual ritual. In fact- other communities have already stopped.

They've forgotten the tradition's origins and purpose. There's hints at a possible old fertility ritual - but it doesn't follow any real patterns for that sort of thing - they're not sacrificing to a god, they're sacrificing just because they've always done so.

I hadn't heard of the story before it was in the group's poll, though I had heard of Shirley Jackson and her novel "The Haunting of Hill House". I got a book collecting a lot of her short stories from the library. "The Lottery" was the last story in the book. I read it first, on my lunch break one day. My initial response was "What an awful story!" But I was intrigued enough by her writing to read more of the stories and have enjoyed some of them very much, so that I have read almost the whole book now. She had such a talent, and could tell so much so quickly, I had to ask myself, "why do some novelists take 500 pages or more to tell a story?" Perhaps I will comment more later on the theme of The Lottery.

The story is chilling, and I found the ending shocking the first time I read it a few years ago. When I read it again, I could see that there was quite a bit of foreshadowing. I started thinking about how often things are done because of tradition and crowd mentality both in the 1940s when Shirley Jackson wrote the story, and also in today's world. My review:
/review/show...

Underwhelmed! As others have said, I think it has a lot to do with your reading background. As a teenager, I was a voracious reader of sci fi short fiction in general and Ray Bradbury in particular. Jackson's story follows what my brother calls the "Twilight Zone formula": mystery, clues, surprise ending, moral: society is evil.

I think that even if I'd read this story at 15, I would've seen the ending coming. If you read a lot of these, then you spot the clues, and you know what the moral is likely to be.

The publication date means that Jackson influenced a lot of the other writers- Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, etc. that I read in my teens.

The one time I tried to watch the first episode of "The Walking Dead," I ended up being more curious about how the zombie apocalypse started rather than what would happen to the characters. When I asked a seasoned viewer if we ever find out, she said no. For me, there was no point going on watching the show.

This story felt like that to me. Maybe it's my background in anthropology, but I became more curious about this "ritual" itself rather than the story. How did it come about? How did it change over time? Why do people still carry on with it? And unfortunately there is just no enough information in the story to satisfy this curiosity. At least in "The Handmaid's Tale," there's just enough information & backstory to satisfy my curiosity. There's just not even much of a hint, except one person complaining in the "it's not like the good old days" kind of way.

(Thanks to Sarah for posting the New Yorker article. I loved what the anthropologist Kroeber thought of it - and that he was Ursula Le Guin's father. The more you know...)

Paula W wrote: "/review/show...

This is my review. The Lottery changed my young life, you guys!"

What a great review Paula. You're right: although I had not read the story before, I could figure out what was going to happen. This idea is so exploited today. But I can imagine what must have been reading the story many years ago.
Anyway, the story is still creepy today.

Sarah wrote: "I came across this piece in the New Yorker (where The Lottery was first published) about the response they got from readers back in 1948 about Jackson's story. Thought you might find..."

Thanks for the link to the excellent New Yorker article.

I can understand why people might feel frustrated in not knowing how the ritual came about. But if we did know, it would no longer be a story that universally applied to any situation of mob mentality or harmful traditions. I would guess that both Hitler and Stalin must have been on the author's mind.

Connie wrote: "I can understand why people might feel frustrated in not knowing how the ritual came about. But if we did know, it would no longer be a story that universally applied to any situation of mob mental..."

I think so too, Connie. Even if Jackson were able to communicate that message while also explaining the ritual, I am not sure it would have delivered the same punch. I feel like her message would have been diluted with the addition of anything extra to her story. I think part of what made her story powerful was its brevity and simplicity (for lack of a better word). The story had just as much as it needed to--nothing more, nothing less.

Sarah wrote: "Connie wrote: "I can understand why people might feel frustrated in not knowing how the ritual came about. But if we did know, it would no longer be a story that universally applied to any situatio..."

Yeah I think if she had been more specific it would not have provoked the kind of analysis she was hoping to stimulate. For sucha short piece it has a lot of layers to it!

Sarah wrote: "I came across this piece in the New Yorker (where The Lottery was first published) about the response they got from readers back in 1948 about Jackson's story. Thought you might find..."


Thanks for the article Sarah. It was very helpful.
Blind obedience to something, just because it has some kind of authority
(a tradition in this case), leads the people of the village to give up their own moral principles.

I read The Lottery in another group read. I have never forgotten it. One of those stories that sticks. Blind obedience to something and you give up your morals. That is the disturbing part of the story. The little kids gathering the rocks is the image that stuck in my mind.

I love Shirley Jackson. I read this many, many years ago--when I was young and the world seemed younger too. :-) I imagine it doesn't have the shock value it did back then. I still think of it now, when I'm confronted with how easily we are led to do awful things.

It seems like a really good story shows the reader something about themselves, and that is what makes this one absolutely chilling.

I'm excited to read all the links and reviews posted here!

Pam wrote: "I became more curious about this "ritual" itself rather than the story. How did it come about? ..."

Pam, I also was so curious to know how the ritual came about, but I must agree with Connie and Jim on this point. The story is about why people still carry on with it: being more specific about the tradition's origin would have meant missing the point.
Jackson highlights that, by insisting on the description of the box: the black box grows shabbier each year and it has no longer its original colour.

I feel exactly the same as everyone else. I realize that WHY they do it and WHAT makes them do it isn't the focus of the story- still would be really interesting to know. The point of the story is to show people who continue to do bizzare rituals for what could be silly reasons.

Also, while the story might not seem as shocking to us nowadays, the story really seems like a precursor to books like The Hunger Games and The Handmaid's Tale (both of which I've read recently). What I love about it is that she does such a brilliant job of setting the community up as this very 1950s, clean cut, suburban community. That last sentence, the first time I read this as a freshman in high school with zero prior knowledge of it, was like a punch in the gut. I remember sitting at my desk as we read it aloud, following along, and at the end thinking, "wait, WHAT?"

Amy wrote: "I feel exactly the same as everyone else. I realize that WHY they do it and WHAT makes them do it isn't the focus of the story- still would be really interesting to know. The point of the story is ..."

I agree. I'd love to know how the ritual originated, personally. But I think it'd ruin the story to have it included, since the whole point of it is to criticize blind obedience to a tradition or authority.

If a reason were given, then the focus would be on critiquing the reason rather than the obedience itself.

It's funny, but I didn't even really think about the origins of the ritual until it was brought up here. Even now, I'm not all that curious. I suppose that's because regardless of its origins, I'm still likely going to think of it as barbaric and senseless. What is more compelling to me is thinking about the issues Jackson raises about blind adherence to tradition and authority, mob psychology, and so on. For example, what traditions and customs might we needlessly and senselessly cling to today, unquestioningly?

Bull fighting always seemed like a barbaric custom to me. Even as a kid when I was read the book Ferdinand the Bill at school, I thought, "wow this seems kind of mean and sick." But they still do it.

Back in the day Id say gladiatorial events, and today, it's not a custom or tradition, but people committing violent crimes and posting it for people to watch live. We all say how disgusting it is, but those types of things gets tons of hits. The film Network deals with this idea as well. In it, an old school news man jokingly comments how each week they should air an "execution of the week". In 2017 I can see how, if they posted a live execution on the internet, millions would probably tune in.

Whatever the origins of the ritual, they have no meaning to these people who continue to adhere to the tradition. They are not, themselves, curious about why they do this--they do it because it has always been that way and (as evidenced by Old Man Warner) they take great pride in having done so for so long. The fact that not one person among them thinks for himself or questions the lottery is perhaps the most chilling element to me.

We would like to think this does not happen today, but of course there is evidence of it all around us. The world had just emerged from WWII and all the horrors of mindless following that marked that time. I sometimes think we have learned very little.

My favourite short story of all time.

Pardon my post, I just wanted to share what I do with my students that really seems to resonate with them.

I teach this with grade 12 students. With my more academic class, on the day we read it (I always read this one with them because I love the shock it creates), when they come in I go through an elaborate set with them. I tell them all about an essay I presumably assign every year. It has to be a minimum of 25 pages, and only one student can write it. Every year that a student does complete the assignment, the entire class average for the rest of the year rises a minimum of 10%. The trick is, no one can volunteer; it has to be that the student who writes the essay, which is for the good of everyone in the whole class, is chosen randomly. I explain that I don't know how it works, and I am not really generally superstitious, but it has never failed yet. But I would leave it to them - would they be willing to risk this massive assignment for the betterment of the rest of them? There is always a vote, and they ALWAYS vote yes.

Then I have students draw a piece of paper from an old box, all the while saying things, like, yes, I don't know how it happens, and please don't think me superstitious or anything, and reminding them to not look at their papers until everyone has drawn. I've never yet had a student cheat. Finally, I tell them to look, and one student invariably freaks about the black dot on his/her paper. There are whispers and shouts about who has the dot.

Then I tell the student that I will help them with the essay, but they have to do it on their own, and that everyone is counting on them. I once had a student refuse, and everyone yelled at him so much I had to step in to calm them down.

Then I tell the student I will give them some resources at the end of class. I tell all the students, "On a different note, we are going to continue with short stories and look at "The Lottery." We can discuss the essay more after we do today's work.

Only after we have finished the story and the shock has worn down, do I explain that, no, the student does not actually need to write the essay, and the students draw the connections and conclusions on their own.

On a different note, the symbolism of the names of the characters is always interesting to me.

Krysta that is a marvelous exercise. The involvement in the selection process before reading the story and knowing its significance cannot help but have some impact on them. I remember studying this story when I was in high school. I am glad it is still part of the curriculum.