The Lottery Analysis

The lottery is like an 800-pound gorilla of symbols in this story. It's in the title, for Pete's sake. Where do we even begin? Well, let's start with the lottery as a way of upsetting reader expect...

A Small Village in the Summer, Year UnknownThis village is cute, rural, and American as apple pie. It could also be located pretty much anywhere. We can't confine the violence of the lottery to a s...

The narrator of "The Lottery" is super detached from the story. Rather than telling us the characters' thoughts or feelings, the narrator simply shows the process of the lottery unfurling. This fur...

These two genres go hand-in-hand (or should that be stone-on-head?) in "The Lottery." By placing the story in a generic small town, the horror of "The Lottery's" ending stands in stark contrast to...

Jackson's removed tone serves to underscore the horror of the lottery—there's no shift in narrative voice when the story shifts profoundly from generic realism to nightmarish symbolism. We go fro...

The very first sentence of the text clues us in: The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was ri...

Not surprisingly, this story's title brings to mind the dictionary definition of, well, a lottery: a happening determined by chance. There's nothing in that definition about good or bad chance—bu...

Jackson defers the revelation of the lottery's true purpose until the very end of the story, when "the winner," Tess Hutchison, is stoned to death by friends and family. This shocking event marks a...

Villagers gather in the square.The story begins with a sense of liberation. It's a beautiful summer day, the children are out of school, and the villagers have begun assembling in the square to ho...

In keeping with our conviction that no single person in this story is exactly the protagonist (check out the "Character Roles" section for more on this), we're going to stretch Christopher Booker...

The first act of any story concludes at the point of no return. We see a lot of anticipation in "The Lottery" as the villagers gather in the square and their children gather stones in a vast pile....

Reading "The Lottery" will help you better understand South Park. No joke. Season 12, Episode 2 of South Park, entitled "Britney's New Look," directly parodies "The Lottery." In the episode, Britne...

What this story lacks in sex scenes, it makes up for in (implied) horrific violence. Despite a G rating when it comes to sexuality, this is not a story we recommend reading to little kids.

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