The Lottery

The Banality of the Lottery

The lottery's like the 800-pound gorilla of symbols. It's massive. It's strong. You can't really miss it, because it's in the dang title.

The genius of the symbol of the lottery is that it doesn't turn the entire idea of a small town community lottery completely on its head; it just twists it until it's horribly warped. The lottery plays out almost—almost—the way you think it will.

Let's look at the expectations you have about this lottery after reading only the first paragraph of the story:

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 richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o'clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 26th, but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o'clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner. (1)

The first thing we learn from this paragraph is that the lottery takes place in late June. It's a detail that resonates, because we associate this time of year with pleasure: school's out but the summer has just begun, it's warm but not hideously hot, there's plenty of sun, etc. This detail primes the reader to anticipate joy and leisure.

Then we learn of a sense of regional tradition. This lottery isn't just happening in one village; it's occurring across several—"in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days." In other words: everybody's doing it. We expect the lottery to follow long-established rules; we expect it to be familiar to everyone.

Finally, we get a sense of bureaucratic efficiency: this is the kind of thing that people want to get through in a couple of hours. So we expect something ordinary and orchestrated.

And here's the rub: all of these expectations about the lottery are met. It's a fun time, at the very least, for the town kids. It's familiar to the townsfolk in the same way Halloween parades or Fourth of July fireworks might be familiar to us. And it's done with a no-nonsense sensibility: the town leaders know the drill and run the lottery on a tight schedule.

Even the cast of characters—the forgetful housewife who shows up late because she thinks her husband is out back, the old dude who brags that he's been playing the lottery for a long time, the town official who wants to upgrade the lottery box but never does—is deeply familiar. They fill us with a warm n' fuzzy sense of continuity: this is what a community tradition looks and sounds like.

In fact, the only thing about this story that shocks us is the fact that "the lottery" turns out to involve stoning a townsperson to death.

And that is why this story's so brilliant. It forces us to look at the traditions we follow in a new light, because it so closely follows the patterns of traditions we're familiar with. And it also forces us to confront what Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil."

Arendt coined this phrase when she witnesses the trial of Adolph Eichmann, one of the people who helped organize the Holocaust. This idea—that the Holocaust had been organized—was so abhorrent that she became preoccupied with the idea of the systematic construction of evil. Or, to quote Judith Butler:

[...] if a crime against humanity had become in some sense "banal" it was precisely because it was committed in a daily way, systematically, without being adequately named and opposed. In a sense, by calling a crime against humanity "banal", she was trying to point to the way in which the crime had become for the criminals accepted, routinised, and implemented without moral revulsion and political indignation and resistance. (Source)

"The Lottery" is so deeply chilling because it shows the how the barbaric ritual of the lottery has been "accepted, routinised, and implemented without moral revulsion and political indignation and resistance." It's such a powerful symbol because it's treated as normal...like so many other atrocities in history have been.